A Cedar Hill man is being praised for his actions after preventing a lost 8-year-old boy from walking into traffic onto Hwy. 30 in Byrnes Mill.
Phil Barnowksi said he was driving home around 5:30 a.m. July 12 and saw a young boy running across Lower Byrnes Mill Road into a cornfield.
“It seemed odd but there’s a house right across the street, so I was like, ‘Okay maybe he lives there,’” Barnowski said. “I just ran home and turned around, and as I came back, I slowed down to look, and he was gone. So, I just kept going real slow, and then I got another half mile down the road, and I saw him cross the road again and run off in another cornfield, basically.”
Barnowski said he stopped his vehicle and called the child to come over to him.
“He was reluctant to come talk to me, so after convincing him that I wasn’t a bad guy and that I was friends with the police, I got him to come close enough to where we could talk,” Barnowski said.
Barnowski said he made up a story about his knee being hurt to get the boy to sit with him until the police came.
“He wouldn’t tell me where he lived, he wouldn’t tell me anything about him. He had a Minecraft shirt on, so we started talking about Minecraft because my kids like Minecraft. We talked about the Minecraft movie — everything other than what was going on,” Barnowski said. “When the cops got there, they took him back to the station and finding his house for him. I sat with him for about 30, 40 minutes.”
Barnowski received a Community Appreciation Award for his actions from the Byrnes Mill Police Department during a Board of Alderpersons meeting on Aug. 5.
“Lower Byrnes Mill Road, as we all know, is a very narrow road and has no shoulder or sidewalk. It’s very dangerous to walk on that road for an adult much less an 8-year-old child,” Byrnes Mill Police Chief Frank T. Selvaggio said while presenting the award. “It was determined that the boy was autistic and had left his home without his parent’s knowledge and walked more than a mile that morning. Your actions, Phil, quite possibly and I think quite possibly is saying it easily, I’m almost certain that you saved that boy’s life. Given the fact that he was about to walk onto Hwy. 30.”
Barnowski also said the recognition meant a lot, but he didn’t do what he did to get an award.
“You just try to help a kid out,” he said. “It’s pretty cool I thought that the chief would think about that, and the city of Byrnes Mill would think about me for that, but honestly I’m just trying to do the right thing.”