What USPS mail carrier Andrew Russell calls “just the right place at the right time” is being hailed as a heroic act by many. On an ordinary day, this postal worker saved a 6-year-old girl from a fentanyl overdose after her mother collapsed. July 16, 2022 was an ordinary day turned extraordinary when Russell became the day’s hero after rescuing a distressed 6-year-old child.

Russell was walking his regular USPS mail route through Wheat Ridge, Colorado, when he heard a child’s desperate cries from inside a car. “I noticed a car pulled over on the side of the road,” Russell recalled. “There was a strange sound, almost like an engine revving.” “What really caught my attention was hearing a child’s voice,” Russell explained, calling the child’s cries “hysterical.”

“It’s pretty immediate whenever I hear a child’s voice that sounds anything like that.” Russell followed the sound of the cries to the parked but idle car and found a woman passed out over her steering wheel, as well as the young girl. “There was a child yelling in the backseat,” Russell explained. The distressed 6-year-old was yelling “my mommy’s dead,” according to Russell.

Russell described his reaction to the scene as “running over there and dropping my mail in this lady’s front yard.” Russell expressed concern for the child, saying, “Her mommy wasn’t moving.” As a result, the child was obviously terrified.” Continuing on how this postal worker saved a 6-year-old, he stated, “first make sure the kids were out of the back seat and then check on the mom.”

Russell dialed 911 as well. Russell discusses that day on YouTube: Russell, on the other hand, had only been on the job for a short time. He’d been doing the route for seven weeks at the time of his Denver Fox 31 interview. Some might argue that it was a good thing he was on that particular route. “It struck a chord in a lot of different ways,” Russell reflected on the experience. “I have a little girl of my own, so it definitely struck a chord.”

She thanked me a couple of times, and it meant the world to me that she was okay.” Concerned about the mother? By the time police arrived, the mother, Ashlee Figgers, 25, had awoken from the overdose and admitted to taking fentanyl. Body camera footage shows the mother telling officers, “Um, it was a fentanyl pill.”
According to Wheat Ridge police, Figgers took the pill and then attempted to drive to a family member’s house with her 6-year-old daughter.

Figgers was arrested for several reasons, including child abuse, driving while intoxicated, and possession of an illegal substance. Wheat Ridge Police Department public information officer Joanna Small told People Magazine. “She became tired while driving and pulled over to the side of the road, where she essentially passed out.”

Regardless of her mother’s actions, Small expressed her hope that Figgers “gets better.” “She is not a hopeless case. “We know she loves her daughter, despite the fact that she is being charged with child abuse,” Small told reporters. “She made a terrible decision that could have had far-reaching consequences for her daughter.”

There is assistance and resources available to her, and we hope she takes advantage of them. She has the ability to change her life.” “So I was in the back…,” the 6-year-old child told TV reporters of her experience. The mailman then came over to me.” It’s unclear whether the child was trapped in the car. “I don’t know if she couldn’t get out of the car or if she was just terrified,” Small said of how the postal worker saved a 6-year-old.

But she was aware that she didn’t know what to do. ” In any case, it was a good thing that the child yelled for help. “She assumed her mother had died. So she saw the mail carrier and yelled for help,” Small explained. Speaking of Russell, an officer who responded to the 911 call expressed gratitude to the postal worker for saving a 6-year-old boy. “I’m grateful he was there to assist the child in this situation so she had someone she could trust.”

However, despite saving a 6-year-old, the postal worker remains humble, saying, “I was just doing my job.”