MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota -- She spoke Spanish in a quiet voice, still shaken by what her son had been through.
"God and the Virgin Mary saved my son, because otherwise he would have tumbled into the water with all the other cars," Ignacia Cruz told me.
I knew it gave her some comfort to speak in her native tongue about what had happened. I explained that my mother was from Spain and that she could speak freely and I would understand.
She went on: her 26 year-old son, Marcelo, had called her around 6:20 p.m. yesterday to tell her to turn on the news. The bridge had collapsed and he wanted her to know he was okay.
"I began to cry and cry, because this was the 2nd time he was saved," Ignacia said.
Marcelo had already escaped death once as a teenager when he'd been shot in a street fight, a fight that left him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. So unlike all the other terrified drivers on the bridge yesterday, Marcelo had an added problem: how would he get out of his vehicle if he managed to survive?
"He could see cars in front of him falling straight into the water," Ignacia said anxiously, imagining the horror her son must have felt. Marcelo's split-second decision to crash his van into the bridge's wall stopped it from going over the edge, and likely saved his life.
But Marcelo had another problem: he couldn't get out of his van, because it was on a slant and he would have rolled into the water had he tried to extricate himself. Two rescue workers found him soon after and pulled him to safety.
-- By Jordana Miller, "360" Producer