Photo Courtesy of SWNS
5-year-old Zavi Ahmed got his chance to be a real-life superhero Tuesday in Uckfield, East Sussex, England, when he helped police free a child locked in her grandparents’ car in a grocery store parking lot. He was even dressed perfectly for the part, wearing a Batman costume.
“Zavi loves to dress up, and that morning he had to be Batman. And he said his little brother Nadeem can be in his ‘super baby clothes,’” Zavi’s mom, Emma Ahmed, in an interview with Yahoo. “My friend jokingly said, ‘He can be a superhero at [the supermarket] Tesco,’ and we couldn’t believe it when he actually was!”
The young super hero sprang into action after he saw police trying to free 1-year-old Iris Adamski, who’d been locked inside the Volkswagen Beetle while her grandmother was loading groceries into their car. Cops smashed the rear window, but couldn’t fit inside to open the door or grab the keys from the dashboard.
Zavi “saw the unsuccessful attempt to get in the back window, and offered to squeeze through and get the keys to be able to get Iris out,” says Emma, who stood close by with Nadeem, dressed conveniently in a Superman costume. “He said, ‘I’m only little, I can do it.’” And “Batman” got the job done all right. After an officer put his sweater down on the window’s edge to protect Zavi from the broken glass, the boy crawled in, retrieved the keys, and opened the door.
Iris’s grandfather John Penny witnessed the whole operation and told the Mirror: “It really was a case of Batman to the rescue.”
How does Zavi feel about pulling off an actual act of heroism? “I asked him,” says mom, “and he gave me two thumbs up and said, ‘Super duper good!’ and that he felt ‘really proud of being able to help baby Iris when the grownups couldn’t.’”