A 10-YEAR-OLD boy from Alabama, the U.S., “may have saved the driver’s life, his own life and the lives of others on the road at the time” when he took the wheel of an out-of-control truck on the I-65 and brought it safely to a standstill, police said Saturday.

    Third-grader Christopher Wheeler was tagging along on a trip to a local scrapyard with driver Alfred Smith, 70, Thursday when the man lost control of the vehicle.

    “I didn’t want us to die,” Christopher told WSFA on Saturday. “The police were behind us the whole time with their lights on. I told him to stop, and he kept going.”

    Special Agent Eric Salvador told the channel he spotted the truck weaving across lanes and signaled the driver to pull over.

    He said the vehicle was “swerving all over the road, back and forth across three lanes of traffic and running cars off the road. It almost hit the center wall several times.”

    Senior State Trooper Lee Walls joined the chaos and tried to get Smith to pull over, to no avail.

    Police later determined that Smith had suffered a diabetic attack, and was drifting in and out of consciousness at the wheel of the speeding vehicle.

    As the truck moved onto an area of Highway 14 with no dividing wall, and began to drift into oncoming traffic, Christopher seized the wheel and took control.

    “I put my foot on the brake, and I got the steering wheel and pulled it over and put it in park,” he told the station.

    “He probably saved some lives,” Walls said, “his own, the driver, oncoming traffic. He was the main contributing factor in getting that car to stop.”

    He added, “He was mature beyond his years.”

    “Without the heroism of that child, I think they would have crashed off the road or into another vehicle. I think he saved a lot of lives out there,” Salvador said.

    “I’ve been in law enforcement eight years and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

    Smith was hospitalized after his diabetic attack, but is in “good condition,” WSFA reported.

    The story was later posted on the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency’s Facebook page, where it gained 12,500 shares and 60,000 likes. And Christopher, who was rewarded for his heroism with a fast food meal by Senior Trooper Walls while his parents arrived, says that he’s now thinking of becoming a police officer.

    (SD-Agencies)