Minnesota Vikings’ K.J. Osborn is being praised for his heroic act over the weekend, during which the wide receiver rescued a man from a burning vehicle that crashed in Texas.
The 25-year-old NFL star said during Monday’s episode of “The Adam Schefter Podcast” that he was traveling back home in a Uber when he witnessed a car that crashed near a bridge in Austin and caught fire.
Osborn recalled that he was in the back of an Uber together with two other individuals when the driver suddenly saw the accident and immediately pulled over to check the scene.
“This is obviously a big risk, you know, I’m kinda coming up to this car, I don’t have experience in this,” Osborn said as he described his thoughts on the “life-and-death” situation. “In my head, I’m thinking this car can blow up at any second and it can all be over. That’s what I was thinking.”
“But my Uber driver, he went straight up to the car and opened the door to try and see if the guy is alive. I’m thinking ‘man this guy is great,'” he recalled. “We see that the guy is alive and we’re yelling ‘He’s alive!’ but he couldn’t move.”
“We start to go down and talk to the guy, we try to get him out of the car,” Osborn continued. “He was able to muster enough strength to move his upper body to the passenger seat, and he was a heavier guy if you’re talking about a normal human being, you know, we’re trying to drag him out of the car.”
After the man was removed from the vehicle, Osborn said he picked him up and carried him for “about 10 to 15 yards” as fast as possible because he believed the car was going to explode.
“He was bleeding all over my shirt,” Osborn said, recalling the moment he picked up the man and brought him to a safe distance from the burning vehicle.
Osborn said that authorities told him that if he, as well as everyone in the Uber, didn’t rush to the injured man’s aid, he would not be alive today.
“He was kind of in a daze,” Osborn said. “I don’t know if he was conscious, but I think he felt the heat coming to his legs. And obviously, he just got into a big crash, so he’s kinda out of it.”
In a statement on social media, Osborn wrote—along with a number of pictures that show the burning vehicle and those who helped the injured man to his safety—that they were “at the right place at the exact right time.”
“Last night myself and these 3 absolute [heroes] helped save a [man’s] life by rescuing him from a vehicle up in flames after a bad crash. A situation I’d never imagine being [a part] of in a million years,” Osborn said.
“I believe God had me, us, at the right place at the exact right time,” he wrote. “I’ll leave you with this. God is real. And His LOVE is real,” he added.
Osborn said that Sunday’s incident was the “craziest” experience he ever encountered in his life.
“I never had a, if you want to say near-death experience because of how close I went to a car up in flames possibly with a chance to explode … I never went through an experience like that,” he said.
Osborn concluded that he was planning to meet with the man in the hospital together with his fellow rescuers.