Soaring through the air over the lush landscape of south Miami, a paraglider spotted a woman in a dire situation. She'd somehow ended up in a canal with her car and was in imminent danger. The glider had no choice but to execute an emergency landing and save the woman.
Cristiano Piquet, 44, a realtor and father of two, was gliding one October Sunday, scouting for real estate before church, when he spotted an alligator in the canal below. Looking closer, he noticed a car submerged in the water—clinging to it was a woman in distress.
“I had no other option but to land. I could not leave that woman,” Piquet told The Epoch Times. “I thought about my mother, it could be my mother.”
He and his paragliding teammates initiated an emergency landing, though ground conditions were suboptimal.
“I landed in a very bad situation between power lines, a lot of trees, uneven terrain, a lot of holes,” he said. “We normally need perfect, smooth green grass to take off and land ... the wind was hitting the trees and power lines and creating rotors [where] the wind becomes like a strong ocean and can throw us to the ground. It’s like falling from the sky.”
The fabric wings of Piquet’s glider buckled in the wind, yet the paraglider believes he had divine help. “God was with me because I was so calm,” he said. The team nailed a perfect landing before Piquet unclipped from his gear and ran over to the canal. The manner in which he offered help to the woman took a page from the Bible.
Piquet recalled Jesus once asking a blind man, “What do you want?” knowing full well he needed help with his seeing. “That’s when I asked the lady, ‘Do you need help?’ ... And she said yes,” the realtor said.
He called out for a neighbor across the canal to bring a rope, and they obliged. The woman, identified as 64-year-old Marcia Fuste, was in a state of shock and had to be instructed several times to release her grip from the car. She eventually obliged and allowed them to pull her to safety.
“There was a 6-foot [elevation] difference between the surface of the houses and the canal,” said Piquet. “She was inside a canal, out of view of the neighbors ... and there were alligators there, the water was freezing. I believe God is the one that orchestrated everything ... God did not want that woman to die that day, because I was her only chance to survive.”
“There was a big canal and I slid right down into it. Thank God the window was open on my side, and I crawled out really quick,” Fuste told the station. “I was trying to keep my head above water, and I did that from 7:30 until 7-something in the morning when the light came out and the gliders found me.”
Piquet told The Epoch Times, “She called me an ‘angel’ and she’s very grateful that I saved her, me and my friends.” He insists he did nothing heroic.
“The world is so crazy nowadays that we do the obvious, we do the expected, and people applaud,” he said. “People think that is noble. I don’t see that I did more than my obligation and what is expected; I cannot be proud or brag about it. I was happy that I saved a life.”
The paraglider moved to the U.S. from Brazil in 2000 to pursue a dream of becoming a race car driver. When he lost his sponsorship after 9/11, he started a real estate company and took up what became his passion: paragliding.
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