A migrant had just crossed the border when he found a scared, 9-year-old boy who needed help. The encounter changed them both

CNN
 — 

Deep in the Arizona wilderness, as daylight faded in the desert mountains, a boy stood on a narrow road, holding a broken mirror.

It was Thanksgiving Day 2007. Chris Buchleitner was 9 years old. The mirror had snapped off the side of his mother’s van a few minutes earlier, when she drove off the road and they went tumbling down a steep hill. Now his mother lay trapped in the crumpled van, down in the canyon. Chris had escaped from the van and climbed up to look for help.

They were a few miles from the Mexican border. Chris had recently seen a Border Patrol helicopter, and he hoped to use the mirror as a signaling device. But the helicopter was nowhere in sight. His mother’s cell phone was out of range. Chris was lonely, afraid, running out of ideas. And then, in the gathering dusk, he saw a stranger approaching.

The man had come from Mexico. He’d crossed the border illegally, planning to start a new life. He’d been separated from his companions as they dodged authorities and the criminals who prey on migrants in the desert. But he was still free, and if he caught a few more breaks he could make it to Tucson or Phoenix and find the kind of job he needed to support his family back home.

Now this man had a choice to make.

He could keep going, safe for now from the Border Patrol, and leave the boy on his own.

Or he could stay, help the boy, and risk getting caught by the same people he’d been evading for the last three days.

Manuel Cordova’s decision would have profound consequences for them both. Later, when the story got out, it would be invoked in the highly charged national debate about the costs and benefits of illegal immigration. That conversation would intensify in the years that followed.

But as night fell on Forest Service Road 39, political arguments did not matter. There was only a boy who needed protection, a woman who needed rescuing, and a man who appeared to be their only hope.

View this interactive content on CNN.com

Reeling from tragedy, a mother and son take one last camping trip

To this day, Chris doesn’t know why it happened. Maybe the sun got in her eyes, or part of the road gave way. Whatever the reason, his mother lost control of the van. She screamed. The van lurched and tipped. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. And as the van rolled and crashed down the hill, Chris pressed himself against the back seat and held on for dear life.

Chris loved camping, but he’d always had a bad feeling about this trip. He wasn’t sure why. Chris and his mother and father had once traveled the American West with their pop-up camper, exploring those glorious open spaces, but a trip like that would never happen again.

Chris’s father had died that September. Now Chris and his mother, a biology teacher named Dawn Tomko, were persevering on their own. Chris told his mom he didn’t want to go camping. But Dawn, a former park ranger, couldn’t wait to get back out into nature.

At home in Rimrock, Arizona, she planned another trip for Thanksgiving week. They brought their dogs, Tanner and Jade. They were on the way back to their campsite from a mountain-biking excursion when the van careened off the road.

Down in the canyon, the van rested against a tree, the engine still running. From the back seat, Chris reached forward and turned off the ignition. His mother was gasping for breath, possibly unconscious, unable to get out of the driver’s seat. Her arm was badly cut, so Chris wrapped it in a blanket. Then he told her he was going to get help.

Chris gathered supplies: binoculars, his mother’s flip phone, the van’s disconnected mirror. The hill was steep and the ground was loose. He slipped, fell back, scraped his knees. But he kept climbing until he got back to the road. There he found a welcome surprise: his dog Tanner, unharmed. (Jade had apparently run off into the canyon after the crash, but Chris thinks Tanner may have jumped out an open window just before the van started rolling down the hill.)

Tanner was a big dog, perhaps 75 pounds, and he made Chris feel a little safer. They’d just started walking down the road when they saw the man. He wore black pants and a black sweatshirt.

At first, Chris worried that Tanner might attack, so he looped the strap of the binoculars through Tanner’s collar. But Tanner seemed to know this man was not a threat.

Chris’s parents had taught him not to talk to strangers, but these were extraordinary circumstances. Chris told the man he needed help. The man looked confused. Gradually, they both realized there was a language barrier. The man pulled out an ID card and pointed to his name. Manuel. He introduced himself as Manny.

Chris knew a few words in Spanish, and he tried to explain the situation. The van was green, so he said verde. It went down the hill fast, so he said rapido. They both made hand gestures. Whatever meaning was lost, some things were easy to understand. It was cold, getting colder, and Chris was in shorts and a T-shirt.

Manuel took off his sweatshirt and draped it around Chris’s shoulders.

The man in black wasn’t alone when he left Magdalena de Kino.

The picturesque Mexican town is a popular pilgrimage site that draws throngs of people every year for its feasts honoring Saint Francis Xavier and Father Kino, a Jesuit priest who founded many missions in the region. But on a November morning in 2007, Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes and about 30 others from Magdalena were making a trek of their own, leaving town in search of opportunities they couldn’t find at home.

Work was hard to come by. Even decent jobs, like one Manuel had working in a factory making surgical scrubs, paid around $100 a week.

Manuel was 26 years old. He’d been partying a lot and using drugs. But he was a father, too, and he knew he needed to support his family.

He had two daughters already, and a third child on the way. So he met up with the group that was leaving that morning in November and headed toward the border, about 60 miles north. He planned to travel to a major city in Arizona and find whatever work he could.

It wasn’t the first time Manuel had made the attempt. He’d been caught and sent back a few times before. This time, he left Magdalena determined that the journey would be different. This time, he was going to make it — and stay.

For days, he’d been doing all he could to keep authorities from finding him. The group from Magdalena scattered across the desert whenever they heard voices or shouting, or any time someone caught a glimpse in the distance of flashing lights. At one point, Manuel burrowed under vegetation and hid for what felt like hours.

Now, here he was, on his own, walking north. And here was something he never expected to see: a little boy standing on the narrow dirt road in front of him. Manuel thought of his own children. They were around the same age as Chris. He knew he’d want someone to do this for them.

After giving the boy his sweatshirt, Manuel went down the hill to check on the woman. From outside the battered van, he could hear her breathing heavily. But he couldn’t see her or figure out how to reach her. He came to a devastating realization: There was no way to pry open the driver’s-side door, and even trying could make a perilous situation worse. The vehicle had rolled over into a canyon — but not all the way to the bottom. It was teetering like a seesaw on the slope of the ravine. Manuel tried to stabilize the van with branches and stones. There was still much further it could fall.

Back on the roadside, he made a huge pile of wood and started a roaring fire, for warmth and a signal, in case someone out there might see it and bring help. He’d been hiding for days. But now his priorities had changed. Manuel was doing all he could to draw attention from the American authorities.

Chris kept thinking about his mother, alone down there in the canyon, but the hill was too treacherous for a 9-year-old to navigate in the dark. So he curled up by the fire, using Tanner the dog as a pillow, and eventually he fell asleep.

As the night went on, Manuel kept returning to the van to check on Chris’s mom. Although he couldn’t free her, he could still hear her breathing.

And then, around midnight, on another trip to the van, he listened for her breathing and heard only silence.

Back up on the road, the fire blazed, and the boy slept, and the long night passed. In the morning, two quail hunters came by in a pickup truck. Manuel flagged them down. They had a satellite phone. One called 911, and the call went through.

With help on the way, Manuel could have headed on for Tucson or Phoenix. But something in him had changed in the night. His destination had shifted. He decided that this was where he needed to be, waiting until an ambulance arrived to take Chris somewhere safe.

The ambulance came. So did firefighters, who discovered Jade the dog nearby in the canyon as they were working to pull the van up the steep incline.

Local and federal officials arrived at the scene, too. Manuel says they put him in handcuffs, but then apologized and removed them after speaking with Chris.

“Forgive us, but it’s my job,” Manuel says a Border Patrol agent told him. “You are illegal here.”

“No problem,” Manuel recalls saying. In a way, he was relieved to be heading home. He had just two requests: he needed a cigarette. And he asked if he could stay at the scene a little longer. He wanted to watch as rescue crews recovered the van. He was still holding out hope that somehow, Chris’s mother had survived.

When they finally extracted her body from the wreckage, no one had to tell Manuel what had happened. He could see firefighters signaling to each other: She was gone.

As Manuel headed back to the Border Patrol truck, he thought of his grandmother, who’d recently died, and his father, who’d recently had a stroke, and Chris’s mother, who he could not save. Tears began to fall.

In the morning’s flurry of activity, Chris hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to Manuel before paramedics took him away in an ambulance. But the firefighters at the scene who’d learned what Manuel had done for the boy found an unexpected way to bid him farewell.

They erupted in a round of applause.

It wasn’t long before Manuel returned to Magdalena as quietly as he’d left. He didn’t tell anyone what he’d seen in the desert. Then, a few days after his deportation, his father came to him with a concerned question: “What did you do?”

People from north of the border were looking for Manuel. The mayor wanted to meet with him. His father heard this from the mayor’s chauffeur, who happened to be his friend.

Manuel told his father about the car crash, the little boy he tried to help and the mother he’d wanted to save. And together, they headed to city hall.

Much to his surprise, less than two weeks after he’d been kicked out of the US, Manuel found himself crossing the border again — this time as a guest of honor inside the Nogales Port of Entry.

Police officers, firefighters and diplomats were there to greet him. So was a gaggle of reporters who’d learned of the story and were eager to share it.

Official after official presented him with plaques etched with his name, praising his courage and selflessness. The local fire chief gave him a small stuffed horse, telling Manuel he’d been a hero in the wilderness, like the Lone Ranger. Mexico’s top diplomat in the Arizona border city lauded Manuel for putting aside his needs and aspirations.

“The desert,” she said, “has a way of rearranging priorities.”

Manuel’s mother sat beside him, wiping tears from her eyes.

There were so many things Manuel meant to tell people that day. But the would-be immigrant found his sudden and unexpected brush with celebrity overwhelming. When a TV camera panned in his direction, he smiled shyly and covered his face with a manila folder. And when Manuel finally had a chance to speak to the crowd, he could think of only one thing to say:

“Gracias.”

Manuel didn’t feel like a hero. His mind was on the people who weren’t there. News reports since the crash had filled in details about Chris’s life that Manuel hadn’t learned that night in the desert. How was Chris now, he wondered, and what would happen to the little boy who no longer had parents to care for him?

When Chris Buchleitner was still a baby, his parents made a plan for the worst-case scenario. His dad, Jack Buchleitner, came from a huge Catholic family in Pittsburgh — he was one of 10 children — and one day Jack and Dawn called Jack’s sister Mary Butera with an unusual request.

If anything ever happened to both of us, Chris’s father asked, would you take care of Christopher?

“And I’m like, ‘Of course!’” his aunt recalled in an interview with CNN.

And so, when something did happen to both parents, Mary and Vinny Butera did take care of Christopher. He moved to Pittsburgh and grew up there, surrounded by the large and loving Buchleitner family. Another aunt even took in the dogs, Tanner and Jade, and Chris visited them regularly for the rest of their lives.

Chris never got over the loss of his parents. Years later, he told a friend it felt as if he had a hole in his chest. But he learned to accept his new life. After coasting for a while in high school, getting by on natural ability, he started working harder. He studied biology, as his mother had, and graduated in 2020 with a nursing degree from Duquesne University.

Now 25, Chris works as a nurse at UPMC Shadyside hospital in Pittsburgh, specializing in heart patients. The job is stressful and challenging, with 12-hour workdays and the occasional loss of a patient, but the time passes quickly. Chris likes his coworkers, and his conversations with the people in his care. The boy who survived is now helping to save the lives of others.

Despite the long shifts, Chris’s work schedule has its advantages. Going to the hospital only three days a week, he has four days open for exploration. Yes, he still loves the outdoors. He spoke with a reporter by phone on a recent Friday while on his way to Coopers Rock State Forest in West Virginia, where he planned to do some bouldering on the sandstone cliffs.

His mother had big plans for him, spectacular places she wanted to take him. One was North Cascades National Park in Washington state, with its high glaciers and sharp mountain peaks. It was too dangerous for a 9-year-old. But in September, Chris went exploring in the North Cascades. And there, in the cold wind and the rugged beauty, he remembered her.

These days, Chris doesn’t talk much about what happened back in 2007. Although his closest friends know all about it, most of his coworkers don’t. Still, he keeps thinking about Manuel, the man in black.

Chris is almost as old now as Manuel was then. Sometimes he wonders what happened to the man who kept him safe. Even when he got older, he didn’t want to look up the old news stories. He figured they’d be too painful to read. He doesn’t know much about what happened to Manuel after that night.

But if they ever met again somehow, he would say, “Thank you.”

Because if Manuel hadn’t stopped to help, Chris says, “I don’t even know if I would have made it through the night.”

A turning point on a mountain road, and a new life in Mexico

Manuel never asked for the fame that briefly found him.

But for months, even years, after that day in the desert, reporters kept calling.

They’d show up out of nowhere at Magdalena’s city hall. Other strangers would, too. Manuel would get a call: “There are people here who want to meet you.”

He’s well aware that some people see immigrants as criminals. He hopes in his story, people see the shared humanity that’s often lost in the debate.

Manuel thinks he did what anyone would do in the same situation. But many others have told him that’s not what they see in his story.

Accounts of the immigrant who sacrificed his dream to help a stranger on Thanksgiving Day are recited with mythic reverence. Ministers mention it in sermons and op-eds praising selfless Good Samaritans. A writer-composer duo wrote a musical about it. And now, even 16 years later, some people in his hometown see him coming and shout out, “Look, it’s the hero of Magdalena!”

Sometimes, Manuel thinks about how, instead of all the plaques and recognition, he would rather have stayed out of the spotlight and gotten a visa to work legally in the United States.

Such perks aren’t without precedent. Victims of crimes and people who help with trafficking investigations are eligible for special visas.

Several years ago in France, an undocumented immigrant scaled the side of a building to save a child dangling from a balcony. He was given citizenship and awarded a gold medal by President Emmanuel Macron.

Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva proposed a bill that would have given Manuel the chance to live and work legally in the US. But the measure never made it out of congressional committee.

Manuel says he never tried to cross the border again. The enthusiasm he once had for that journey lost its luster. And he found something unexpected within himself.

Manuel is now living hours away from Magdalena in the border city of Mexicali, working in a bazaar. He says his life is dramatically different than it was on that night in the Arizona wilderness.

“Before, with my drug addiction, I couldn’t talk with clients,” he says. “If a customer would come in, I’d run to the back. I couldn’t face people.”

Now, when a customer walks in, he’s not scared to get up and greet them. He banters with them and exchanges pleasantries. He lets them look him in the eye.

Within weeks of his return to Mexico, Manuel says, he put drugs behind him. And he credits the harrowing and heartbreaking night in the desert with helping him see the world and his place in it more clearly. Not as a hero, but as a man.

“I was a mess. I was young. … It really changed my way of thinking,” he says. “Because beforehand, I only thought about myself. What I did was what was important. Not anymore.”

Manuel realized he’d been on the wrong path for years. He hadn’t been there enough for his kids and had even served jail time at one point for failing to pay child support. When he returned to Mexico, Manuel says he got closer with his family. He’s 42 years old now and has seven children and four grandchildren.

He still thinks about Chris, wondering how he’s doing, or how it might have gone if they hadn’t met. And instead of wondering about an alternate future for himself in America, he wonders how life would be different if he’d happened upon a crowbar or another tool that could have pried open the van. Could he have saved Chris’s mom, too?

Sometimes he wakes up in the night, grabbing the edge of his blanket. In his dreams, he’s still there at the van door, trying to pull it open.

Over the years, the story faded from the headlines. But Manuel still fields questions. These days, they’re more likely to come from surprised friends who play on soccer teams with him in Mexicali and happen upon a photo of the ceremony he once shared on Facebook.

“Just like the reporters…asking and asking,” Manuel says. Always with the same incredulous inquiries.

Why did you stop? 

What was it like? 

If you could do it over again, would you make the same choice?

That last one is easy for Manuel to answer.

“One and a thousand times more,” he says. “Without thinking about it or doubting it.”