“I fall … really, really far,” 4-year-old Dylan Hayes said in an interview after miraculously surviving a three story drop during which the child somersaulted twice before landing on his feet.
Local Denver CBS affiliate KCNC reports that young Dylan was standing on the living room couch trying to talk to his downstairs neighbors when he fell through.
“I was terrified,” his mother Jessica Hayes told the station. “I didn’t know what I was going to see when I got down to the ground floor.”
She had moved the couch next to the window Dylan fell through because she was shampooing the living room carpet.
“I didn’t know what I was going to go down to, like a child who was just lying there, or a child with blood coming out of him,” Hayes said during what must have been the longest trip down that flight of stairs in her life.
Despite landing on his feet, Dylan was taken to a local hospital and kept under observation for 20 hours. Doctors placed a brace on his neck as a precaution but said he appears to not have suffered any serious physical injuries. Even more amazing, Dylan landed on a bed of rocks.
The ordeal led to one news outlet referring to Dylan as a “superboy,” for his miraculous luck.
“There had to have been angels watching over him,” Dylan’s grandmother Kelli Hayes told the station.
For her part, Jessica Hayes said the incident has reminded her to never make assumptions about her child’s safety. She’s also moved out of the apartment and is looking for a new home on the ground floor.
“It’s gotten easier since it happened two weeks ago to not blame myself,” she said. “I wish the danger would have crossed my mind, which it didn’t.”