Rudy was lying on the ground on the seafront in Southend, England, in the middle of a meltdown.
His mother, Natalie, was trying to calm him as best she could when a man named Ian approached. He didn’t ask what was happening or offer advice from a distance: when he learned that the boy had autism, he simply said “it’s okay, I’ll lie down with him” and lay down beside him, in the middle of the street, without caring who was watching them.
He stayed there, speaking to him calmly, until Rudy —diagnosed with autism at the age of two and with speech and sensory-processing difficulties— stopped crying. Then he walked with them to the car, as if they were old acquaintances. Natalie didn’t know how to thank him other than by calling him her hero on Facebook, and thousands of people understood why.
