THE PARENTS of an 18-month-old boy were being questioned by police in Paris last night after the baby fell from a seventh-floor apartment and bounced off a cafe awning safely into the arms of a passerby, who was a doctor.
" Un véritable miracle," proclaimed Le Parisienof the incident, which occurred in the northeast of the city on Monday afternoon. The baby had been playing unsupervised with his four-year-old sister when he fell through a balcony railing. A young man saw the child starting to fall and alerted his father, who raced arms outstretched to catch him after he hit the awning. Police said the boy appeared to have no serious injuries and was under observation in a nearby hospital.
The owner of the cafe, located at the foot of the block of flats in the 20th arrondissement, said it was a stroke of luck he had decided to leave the awning open.
“I usually close it to stop it catching fire as people tend to throw their cigarette butts onto it,” he told television station iTélé.
The doctor, identified as Philippe Bensignor, said it was pure luck. “I was there at the right time, as anyone could have been. The baby was fine. He was crying a little, but he calmed down straight away. Then he quickly fell asleep.”
The boy’s parents were still being questioned yesterday, but the circumstances remained unclear. “The parents were absent and it’s a little difficult to question the children, given their age,” a police spokeswoman said.