Nine-year-old Anaiah Rucker is one tough, little hero. She was helping her little sister, 5-year-old Cameron Harden (“Camry”), cross the street to get to a school bus stop in Georgia last month when Camry stepped in front of a pick-up truck.
On the Today show this morning, Anaiah told Ann Curry that she didn’t even think twice about pushing her sister out of harm’s way. Anaiah ended up getting hit instead and suffered a broken neck, lost a kidney, has spleen damage, and broke both legs. One leg had to be amputated.
“I love her more than anything,” Anaiah told Channel 2′s Tom Jones of her sister.
Anaiah says it had been raining that morning and the hood of her sweatshirt was covering her eyes as the pair tried to make it across the street. Andrea Taylor, the girls’ mother, watched in horror from her front porch, as she does every morning.
“I saw the truck and I was like, ‘No’,” Taylor said. “I seen 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.”
This morning, Anaiah said she doesn’t feel like she should be called a hero. She was just looking out for her sibling. She said that Camry was just “too young to be hit like this, and if she got hit she wouldn’t hardly be alive. She would be probably gone forever.”
As soon as the pick-up struck the child, bus driver Loretta Berryman pulled over and performed CPR on Anaiah, who had stopped breathing.
“I instructed her mom to hold her head while I gave mouth-to-mouth, chest compressions,” Berryman said. “As she took a breath, my first thing was, ‘Thank God’.”
“I knew when she started breathing she was going to make it,” added Berryman. “God had better things for her to do.”
“I don’t care if I get hurt or sick because of her,” said Anaiah. “I love her. I didn’t want her to be the one that had to face all these injuries.”
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