What a save
Woman stops tot from running into traffic
JEANNIE TURISSE spied the pint-sized boy running alone down a Tribeca sidewalk and instantly saw trouble.
The Staten Island mom flew into action as the adorable 3-year-old headed toward evening rush-hour traffic on Greenwich St., his missing nanny nowhere in sight.
“I took off running, and just grabbed his hand,” Turisse told the Daily News. “He was very sweet — took my hand, didn’t try to run away.”
The Wednesday night rescue came with a second, even happier ending: A reunion between the lucky little boy and his relieved parents inside the First Precinct.
“I thought I would have a heart attack,” the toddler’s mom said Thursday about his disappearance. “When I saw him, I started crying. I could not believe what happened.”
The toddler’s parents never crossed paths Wednesday with his rescuer, but Turisse exchanged text messages with the mother.
Turisse, the vigilant mother of a 5-year-old boy, shrugged off her fellow parents’ accolades.
“God just put me in the right place at the right time,” said Turisse, 44, after returning Thursday to her job with Citigroup.
“I’m just a decent person, doing what people are supposed to do.”
Turisse was braced for the worst after spying the runaway boy as she walked down Greenwich St. at 5:05 p.m. after calling it quits for the day.
The boy was with his nanny in Washington Market Park when the two became separated, with the kid running uptown along Greenwich St. toward Harrison St., police said.
Turisse, after steering the kid away from oncoming cars, said her first reaction was to look for his parent or guardian.
“I expected to see someone running frantically toward me,” she recounted. “And there was nobody. I asked some people, ‘Do you recognize this kid?’ And none had ever seen him before.”
Turisse eventually walked with the toddler to the nearby First Precinct, where the officers fed him Pop Tarts and let him watch cartoons.
The nanny had by then reached out to the child’s parents, and the panicked mother — who spoke on condition of anonymity — found herself thinking the worst.
“I thought I would never see my son again,” she recounted. “So many things were going through my mind.
“But thanks to Jeannie, he is safe. She’s a really good human, a really good mom, for saving my child. I cannot thank her enough.”
No criminal charges were filed in the incident, police said. And the family decided to keep the nanny in their employ.
Turisse saved the texts from the little boy’s mom, sharing them with the Daily News.
The two connected by phone later Wednesday night, with Turisse offering her thanks for the kind messages.
“You are my Angel!” read one of the mom’s texts. “If not (for) you, I don’t know if he would be alive right now.”