It looks like a nightmare in the making, caught on video -- a dashcam shows the tiny figure of a child tumbling from the back of a moving minivan onto the unyielding pavement of a bustling thoroughfare in China.
The child, no doubt dazed and bewildered after his sudden fall from his grandfather's vehicle, stumbles helplessly after the minivan as it pulls away. Desperately alone in the chaos and danger of oncoming traffic is a 2-year-old boy.
But the people in the car whose dashcam caught the child's fall stopped and got the boy to safety. Another driver chased and stopped the grandfather, identified in Chinese media as Yang Defu.
Yang later told state-owned CCTV that his minivan had been in a rear-end collision days previously, and the wreck broke the vehicle's tailgate lock. The child, who initially had been sitting in a passenger seat, had crawled back in the van as his grandfather drove and accidentally hit the broken lock as the vehicle accelerated from an intersection, according to Wujiang Daily, a government-owned newspaper.
"I was waiting at the red light. After passing the intersection a car chased after me and kept sounding the horn," Yang told CCTV. "The driver told me a kid fell out of my van. I looked back, parked my van aside, and went back to search for my grandson."
Yang ran back to the intersection, and grandfather and grandson were reunited by the passersby who aided the child.
The dashcam video of the incident Saturday in Jiangsu province north of Shanghai went viral on the Internet, prompting a flurry of criticism for the grandfather, for not using measures such as a child car seat.
