Anaiah Rucker saved her sister Camry by stepping in front of a truck, sacrificing a leg and a kidney.
Last month, nine-year-old Anaiah Rucker and her sister Camry, 5, were crossing the street to get to their schoolbus stop when Camry walked into the path of an oncoming truck. Camry didn’t see the truck or realize the danger she was in, but her big sister did. Anaiah took immediate action, pushing her sister out of the way and taking the full impact herself.
The girls’ mother, Andrea Taylor, watched the incident with horror from her front porch. “I [saw] my daughter kinda snatch my 5-year-old back, and if it wasn’t for that, my 5-year-old would have ... I don’t think she would have made it,” she told Channel 2 News.
Camry got through the incident without a scratch, but Anaiah wasn’t so lucky. After getting hit by the truck, she was lying on the ground, not breathing. Her chances seemed grim.
Fortunately, their bus driver, Loretta Berryman, knew CPR, and rushed to help Anaiah as soon as she saw what had happened. “As she took a breath, my first thing was, ‘Thank God,’” she told NBC News.
Still, Anaiah was in for a long recovery. She spent more than a month in the hospital, and lost a kidney and a leg. She recently returned to her home, which had been recently renovated to make it handicap-accessible, thanks to donations from friends in the community. Although life will never be the same for Anaiah, she doesn’t regret what she did.
Camry “was too young to be hit like this, and if she got hit she wouldn’t hardly be alive,” she told the TODAY Show. “She would be probably gone forever.”
Watch a video about Anaiah below.