Mattia Aguzzi, a 37-year-old Italian, was walking with his partner this Saturday through the streets of Via Nizza, about 5 kilometers from the center of the Italian city of Turin. Suddenly, he heard screams and saw a girl hanging from the fifth floor. The little girl couldn’t hold on and she fell in a matter of seconds. In the middle of the little girl’s flight, the man ran to try to grab her and cushion her impact against the sidewalk with her own body. Both suffered injuries, but their lives are not in danger.
“I closed my eyes and waited,” said the man from the clinic about the dramatic moment that took place around 11 a.m. -local time- in the presence of other neighbors. It all started with the desperate screams of one of them. Leaning out of his balcony, he saw that in the opposite building there was a girl clinging to a window sill. Her parents, who were at home, had not noticed the incident and the causes are being investigated.
“We heard a boy from the building across the street scream, we looked up and saw this girl sitting on the ledge,” said Gloria Piccolo, Mattia’s girlfriend.
“He yelled at her to stay still, while we rang all the bells. When she turned around, the girl had already fallen. Mattia caught her on the fly, I don’t know how she did it, and she fell to her knees,” she said in statements to the local television Corriere.
He said that, moments later, the girl began to cry, as could be heard in one of the videos that appeared on the networks about the moments after the fall. “When we heard her, we breathed relief. She was alive,” exclaimed the couple of the man who was listed as a “hero” by the rest of the neighbors.
The girl was immediately transferred to the Regina Margherita hospital in the Piedmontese capital, although her life is not in danger. On his part, the man also had to be assisted due to a chest trauma. “It’s okay. He was under observation and he was going to have X-rays,” explained her partner.
