Trejo, 75 at the time, happened to be in the area. He saw the crash. He went to the vehicle.
He is not, in any professional capacity, a first responder. He is an actor. He is also someone who has described, across decades of public interviews, a consistent personal philosophy about the relationship between helping others and the quality of one’s own life. On August 7, 2019, those two things — the actor who happened to be nearby, and the man whose philosophy says you help — converged at a wrecked car on Hubbard Street.
## The Rescue: What the Reporting Establishes
The sequence of events, as documented across multiple news reports and Trejo’s own statements at the scene, is as follows:
Trejo reached the overturned vehicle and identified the child in the back seat. Another man helped pull open the rear door. Trejo crawled into the vehicle from one side. He tried to unbuckle the child’s car seat, but he couldn’t reach the buckle from the angle available to him on that side of the car.
He has said this himself, directly: “I couldn’t get the baby out.” The statement is worth noting because it is the honest account of what happened — he tried, he couldn’t do it from where he was, and someone else came in from a different position to do the part he couldn’t do.
A bystander — identified in some reporting as Monica Jackson, described as a young woman — crawled through the window from the other side of the vehicle. She reached the car seat buckle from that angle and undid it. Together, Trejo and the woman pulled the child free.