A School Bus Rolled Past His Family’s Store With the Door Open and 19 Kids Inside. He Had Never Driven a Bus

It was a slow Monday afternoon outside a little corner store in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Then a yellow school bus rolled past him with its door wide open.

What he saw through that door made him drop everything and run.

A Bus That Should Have Stopped

His name is Ebro Ahmed, and he is 27 years old.

He works at one of his family’s corner stores, Ya Bricks Snacks and Tobacco, in the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood of St. Paul.

On Monday, Oct. 19, business was slow, so he took a break outside with a soccer ball, MPR News reported.

Around 3:17 p.m., the store’s security camera caught a school bus moving slowly past the corner.

Its door was open. Its stop arm was still sticking out.

But instead of stopping, it kept rolling forward.

It was moving at about 10 mph with its lights flashing, Ebro told CBS News, which a school bus only does when it is stopped.

“When he drove past me, it really shook me,” he told CBS News. “I was like, ‘What is going on?'”

What He Saw Through the Door

Ebro looked inside and saw the driver.

The man behind the wheel appeared to be having a seizure.

“I saw a bus roll past me with the doors open, and I saw the bus driver seizing up,” he told KSTP.

Behind the driver sat 19 students from Battle Creek Middle School, according to St. Paul Public Schools.

Nobody was in control of that bus.

The security video shows him sprinting from the sidewalk and jumping onto the moving bus.

He Had Never Driven a Bus

Ebro had never been behind the wheel of a school bus in his life.

“All I looked at was the gear control and I was trying to put it into park,” he told CBS News.

In the panic, he mixed up the gears.

“I started hearing beeps and we were going backwards,” he said. “And then I said, ‘That is not right,’ and I threw it into neutral and pulled the [parking] brake.”

The bus finally stopped.

According to MPR News, the whole thing took just under 15 seconds.

The Kids Behind Him

When the bus was finally still, Ebro turned around.

“When I looked behind me, I saw all of the kids kind of a little scared, crying with their phones out getting ready to call the police,” he told CBS News.

Two girls sitting near the front helped him a lot, he said.

“I threw my phone and my glasses at one of them and I told her to hold it,” he recalled.

He had a student call the police, MPR News reported, and officers arrived within minutes.

Ebro stayed gentle with the man, who was slowly coming back to himself.

“After everything, he was coming to, but he’s still kind of out of it,” he told CBS News. “And so I just let him be.”

‘Am I Going to Get Arrested?’

In that moment, Ebro was not sure he was doing the right thing.

“‘Am I going to get arrested?'” he remembered asking himself, in his interview with MPR News.

“Like I was just very scared,” he said.

He was scared, and he did it anyway.

Nobody on the bus was hurt, St. Paul police said.

Another bus came to pick up the students and take them home, and some of them walked.

And the driver? He was released from the hospital and was resting at home by Wednesday, the district said.

Lessons From a TV Show

So how did a man with no medical training stay so calm?

Ebro gives some of the credit to his favorite TV show, “Grey’s Anatomy.”

“In ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ you never see doctors panic,” he told CBS News. “I know it is all acting and stuff, so I just knew to be calm and just think everything through.”

Ebro was born in Eritrea and grew up in St. Paul, MPR News reported.

He credits his Muslim faith and an Eritrean American youth group, Denden Sports Club, for teaching him to act fast.

“In my religion, they say one life is the equivalent to the entire humanity… and if you save one person, it’s equivalent as if you saved the whole world,” he said.

A Knock From Superman

One woman who saw it decided that a thank-you was not enough.

Sheletta Brundidge, a Minnesota media maker and philanthropist, showed up at his family’s store on Thursday morning, Oct. 22.

She did not come alone.

She brought a performer named Brian Lepel, dressed head to toe as Superman.

And she brought a giant check for $1,000.

“Not all superheroes wear capes; some are store clerks,” Brundidge told Storyful.

“You could have ran inside, called 911, and let somebody else do the work, but you actually sprung into action just like a real-life superhero,” she told him, according to MPR News.

Ebro already knows what he wants to do with the money.

He plans to put it into his own window-tinting business, MPR News reported.

‘Anyone Would Have Done It’

He still works at his family’s corner store, where he says business has been slow lately.

And he still refuses to call himself a hero.

“I feel like any person in my situation would have done the same thing,” he told CBS News.

“It’s kids we’re talking about, you know,” he told ABC News. “Even if I were to die, it would still be worth it.”

Nineteen families got their children home safe that Monday.

A bus driver got to go home and rest.

And it all came down to one young man who looked up from a soccer ball at exactly the right moment.

Ebro noticed.

The next time something feels wrong, remember him, and look twice.

If this story gave you hope, share it so more people can meet the clerk who stopped a runaway bus.