The car seat, which had held through the crash and the inversion, is the thing Trejo credited immediately. “The only thing that saved that little kid was his car seat, honest to God,” he said at the scene. The statement is both factually accurate — the car seat’s primary function in a crash is to protect the occupant — and a deliberate act of attribution, a decision to put the credit where it belonged rather than on himself.
While firefighters from the Los Angeles Fire Department worked to free the grandmother from the driver’s seat — a process that required the kind of equipment and technique that professional rescue services carry — Trejo kept the boy away from the wreck. He kept him facing away from the accident. He kept him occupied.
His method, as he described it, was to use the boy’s own energy. He got the child to yell “superpowers” with him. Then “muscles.” He has noted that he works with special-needs children, though the specific nature of the child’s circumstances in this case is not something that the reporting established in detail, and any characterization beyond what is documented is speculation. What the reporting documents is that the approach worked: the child was distracted and calmed while the adult work of freeing the grandmother proceeded around them.
The Los Angeles Fire Department reported that three people were transported to hospitals. None of the injuries were described as life-threatening. The grandmother, the child, and a third person — the driver of the second vehicle, according to some accounts — were treated and survived.