Verse from Qu’ran inspired US man to leap on runaway school bus and halt it

Ebro Ahmed, who acted after driver’s medical emergency, said he hopes incident will show Eritreans ‘in a good way’

A man who hopped on to a school bus full of terrified children that was careering down a Minnesota street after its driver had a medical emergency and manually halted it says he was motivated to act by a Qu’ran verse about how saving one life is equivalent to saving all of humanity.

“I’m a numbers guy, and those numbers make sense to me,” Ebro Ahmed, 27, said on Friday during an interview about his actions four days earlier in front of his family’s convenience store in Saint Paul, Minnesota . “I didn’t do it for me. It was selflessness in the name of God.”

In a dramatic sequence of events captured on surveillance video by the shop, Ahmed was kicking a soccer ball and scrolling on his cellphone during a break outside his family’s Ya Bricks Snacks and Tobacco store on Monday afternoon when he noticed a yellow school bus passing by with its door flung open.

Ahmed said he deduced something was wrong when he saw the bus driver with foam coming out of his mouth, which can be a symptom of a seizure. He recalled instinctively sprinting to the bus; leaping through the door; and tossing his phone and glasses at two girls in the front to free his hands.

His first thought was to see if he could somehow shift the bus into park. But, with frightened boys and girls screaming all around him, Ahmed said he pulled the emergency brake on the bus, bringing the vehicle to a stop without anyone onboard or on the street being injured.

A statement from Saint Paul’s public school district on Friday confirmed there had been a medical emergency on the bus outside Ahmed’s family store that day that required paramedics to respond. Another bus came to pick up the 19 students onboard and bring them home, the district said.

Meanwhile, the driver was resting at home after being brought to a hospital and discharged.

The National Safety Council estimates that about 20.3 million children ride school buses across the US daily – a number large enough for driver-related emergencies to occasionally occur.

When such emergencies do happen, quick-thinking and -acting bystanders can often help avert disaster.

The local news outlet KTSP obtained and published the surveillance video of Ahmed running on to the runaway bus. That footage went viral alongside an interview that the station did with Ahmed, in which he credited the medical TV drama Grey’s Anatomy with teaching him “what to do in situations that you could never see yourself in”.

Ahmed elaborated with the Guardian on Friday, saying the Qu’ran verse declaring that “whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity” also entered his mind at the moment he decided to intervene on Monday.

Furthermore, he mentioned how challenging it had been for his parents – who are immigrants from the east African country of Eritrea – to run a store in Saint Paul during the mass deportation campaign pursued by Donald Trump during his second presidency.

Ahmed, who said he was US-born, added that business at the store had dropped ever since federal immigration agents at the forefront of that campaign descended on Saint Paul and nearby Minneapolis as part of what the Trump administration dubbed Operation Metro.

“It’s been hard … as a small east African business,” Ahmed said.

But Ahmed described a welcome sense of relief taking the opportunity to – as he called it – portray Eritreans and represent Eritreans and east Africans “in a good way”.

He alluded to a local marketing and media company donating $1,000 to him as a token of appreciation for his bus heroics – a presentation which involved a Superman performer and a novelty check.

Ahmed said he had been invited to speak on at least one panel, and a city council member had contacted him to congratulate him. An uncle in Europe did, too, after learning of what Ahmed had done on the news.

Perhaps most meaningful to Ahmed, he said, was seeing his story trend among Eritrean circles.

“It makes me proud to be able to represent them in a good way,” Ahmed remarked.