Jairo Torres was commuting to work in New York City on Monday morning when he saw something so horrific happen that he will never forget it.

A depressed father who was arguing with his wife over the phone jumped in front of an incoming train, taking his 5 year-old daughter with him in his suicidal jump. Everyone on the platform screamed, and for a millisecond, everything seemed to be frozen.

“I was paralyzed at first, just like everyone,” said Torres, a 36 year-old construction worker. “But then I just jumped. … I didn’t do it to be a hero .. it was immediate.”

When he looked under the train, Torres braced himself for the worst, but then he saw a little girl with a pink backpack move.

“When she moved her hand I said thank God she’s alive,” Torres recalled. “I said to myself, ‘The girl is alive, the girl is alive!’ It was the first thing I thought of, because there’s always a space between the train and the track. I knew in my heart she was alive.”

Torres immediately cried out for the child, who screamed back, “Papi, papi!”

“I couldn’t crawl under the train because of the electricity in the tracks,” he said. “Then I took her out and passed her to the person on the platform.”

After reuniting the little girl with her grateful mother, Niurka Caraballo, Torres hugged both her and the little girl he rescued.

“She hugged me and thanked me and cried of course, and that was everything,” he said.

The girl’s father, who has been identified as Fernando Balbuena, was killed. Caraballo told reporters that while she knew Balbuena was battling depression, she has no idea what brought on his suicidal leap.

“He was a good husband, a good father, a good provider and a good man,” she said through a translator. “I had no idea.”

Find out more in the video below.