Todd Kanno was supposed to be somewhere else in the world on Tuesday night — serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Instead, health problems kept the 19-year-old Honeyville man home, putting him in the right place at the right time to rescue a 3-year-old girl who was critically injured in a car crash.

Kanno was headed home on northbound I-15 about 3 p.m. after picking up his final paycheck from Smith and Edwards. He was talking to his mom on his cell phone when he saw a tire on a southbound car come apart.

"I saw the puff of dust and I saw the tire — the tread off the tire — because the tire peeled," Kanno said Wednesday. "I told (my mom) I had to go."

As Kanno watched, the driver of the car went off the road in one direction, over-corrected, slammed on her brakes, and crashed off the right side of the road down a 6-foot embankment near Willard Bay.

"My dad was a highway patrolman and an EMT," Kanno said. "I was always taught that if you see something happen, you need to go and help and do what you can."

Kanno took the next exit, crossed under I-15 and then got on the southbound on-ramp. He estimates it took him less than five minutes to reach the crash scene.

As he approached the overturned car, the driver, Shannon Cantwell, and her three young children had already freed themselves from the wreckage. A semi-truck driver was on the phone with emergency dispatchers, Kanno said, and a husband and wife who stopped at the scene were each holding one of Cantwell's children.

"She was hysterical; screaming for help," Kanno said of Cantwell.

The 26-year-old Brigham City woman told Kanno that her niece was in the vehicle, strapped into a car seat and submerged under the water running through the drainage ditch.

Kanno waded in.

"The mud came up almost to my knees and I'm 6 feet tall," he said. "The water was a little below my waist."

He tried to open one of the car's doors. It wouldn't budge. He slogged around to the other side of the vehicle, but that door was also wedged shut. So Kanno returned to the first door he'd tried.

"Somehow I got my hand in and opened the door enough that I could get a little leverage," he said, still unsure of how he managed the feat.

Kanno climbed into the car and saw the bottom of the car seat and a cast on the leg of 3-year-old Amara Young.

"The rest (of her body) was under water," Kanno said. "I undid the car seat and I pulled her out.

"I pulled her to my chest and she was just limp like a rag doll," he added. "There was nothing in her. Her eyes were rolled back and her face was blue."