Man driving down Illinois 15 saw smoke. He found a woman crawling from a burning car.

James Cron was driving east on Illinois 15 on his way to take his child to a Freeburg daycare when he saw smoke coming from down an embankment along the highway.

Construction workers and orange cones were along the highway prevented him from stopping, though he though he saw a car down the hillside. Once he was able to get to the side of the road, he shifted into reverse and went back to where the smoke was coming from.

That’s when he confirmed what he thought he saw down that embankment. He called 911 immediately, but couldn’t answer when the dispatcher asked if anyone was inside the vehicle.

“I didn’t know and I told him that and I said I need to get down there,” Cron said.

Sliding out through a window of the burning car, was a young woman.

“She had a pretty good sized gash right down her forehead and above her eye was bleeding pretty good. She had a gash on her leg,” Cron recalled. He said the woman asked him to save her phone and purse before the fire was out of control.

The driver, a 26-year-old-woman, appeared to have lost control of her car on about 7:45 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 26 according to Belleville Assistant Fire Chief Bud Jacobs. The day of the accident, traffic was tied up near the Belleville exit for at least an hour as firefighters worked to put out the fire and a tow truck to pull it out of the ditch.

“I helped her up the hill,” Cron said. Then he ran to his vehicle and took a sweatshirt out and ripped the sleeves off of it to use as a compress to help stop some of the bleeding. He had her lean back on his leg while he placed the compression to her head he said.

When Belleville police arrived, they told Cron to move the woman farther away from the vehicle in case it exploded.

That’s the last time Cron saw the woman was when the ambulance took her to the hospital. He said he doesn’t know her name or where she is from, but he would like to know that she is OK.

He’s been called a hero, but Cron insists he is not.

“I was just doing what I would hope someone would do for me or my family if I was faced with a situation like what she was in,” he said.

He was amazed that only one other person stopped to offer help.

“It boggles my mind,” he said.