Miguel Tigsilema was on his third day working at a construction site in Brooklyn, leveling dirt in a corner of the pit with his shovel, when he heard what sounded like enormous tree trunks breaking in half.
He turned to look behind him and saw the building next to the site tumbling down. He took off running, his helmet flying off as he raced for the street. He tripped and fell, the dust of the collapse blinding and choking him.
Mr. Tigsilema got up and scrambled to the street, where he screamed at passers-by to call for help.
He paused, grateful to be alive.
He looked back down at the pit and thought of his fellow workers who might be trapped in the rubble.
“I had just been thinking of saving myself,” Mr. Tigsilema, 35, a father of three who was born in Ecuador, said in an interview. “God gave me the strength and courage to go back.”
That was when he heard a woman’s muffled screams.
“Help me,” he remembered her calling out. “Save my children.”
He could see a tiny hand through the debris. Mr. Tigsilema and other workers from the site began to dig with their hands.
Almost immediately, he saw a small child — barefoot, with a blue shirt and light brown curls, not much older than his own son, who is 1 and a half.
The child was stunned and covered in dust, but he was relatively unscathed. He had only minor scratches on his head and leg that were later treated at a hospital, according to his father.
Mr. Tigsilema had played a part in a small miracle. The 2-year-old, Joseph, had been sitting on the floor of his family’s third-floor apartment when the building collapsed on Wednesday. Eight people were killed, including three construction workers. But somehow Joseph had landed here in the wreckage, alive and well.
Mr. Tigsilema grabbed the boy and held him tight as the rest of the workers kept searching for other survivors.
The child began to wail. “Where is my mommy?”
Mr. Tigsilema tried to comfort him.
“Mommy is OK,” he murmured. “She is going to be OK.”
She was. The workers pulled out the boy’s mother, Johana, and 9-year-old brother, Pablo, both injured but alive.
Mr. Tigsilema held Joseph for what felt like five or 10 minutes.
He felt like he was holding his own son.
“I felt stronger holding this boy,” Mr. Tigsilema said. “I kept thinking, This boy has a future now.”
The firefighters arrived almost immediately, and the child was taken away.
A video of Mr. Tigsilema holding the boy after the collapse quickly began circulating on social media.
One of the people who saw it was Joseph’s father, Anderson.
He had been painting walls at a different work site in the Bronx, when he received a call from his wife, Johana. She had been screaming about something, but the call had dropped before he could figure out what was going on.
Anderson, who asked that his last name be withheld for privacy, found Joseph and Johana at a hospital, where she was treated for a broken clavicle and broken ribs. Pablo, his 9-year-old son, underwent surgery on his skull. Pablo and Johana remain in the hospital.
“He was a child very blessed by God,” Anderson recalled in an interview, fighting back tears.
In the chaotic days since the collapse, both Anderson and Mr. Tigsilema have struggled to sleep, replaying the scenes of the devastation. They had not met or spoken to each other until Friday night, when they chatted on a video call after Anderson’s wife obtained Mr. Tigsilema’s number.
“He saw my child on the call and broke down,” Anderson said. “I thanked him for being our family’s hero. And I told him I wanted to meet him in person once my wife and son are out of the hospital.”
Mr. Tigsilema said in an interview that he had not stopped thinking of the others who died.
And he had been thinking about his own children — two girls, 12 and 8, and his young son — and what would have become of them if he himself had not made it.
“I can’t calm down,” he said. “I can’t sleep. I keep crying. I’ve cried so much I don’t have tears left.”
Mr. Tigsilema said he believed Joseph and his family were saved for a reason.
“I think God wants something for that boy and for that family,” he said. “I feel like he is meant to do something great.”
Madaleine Rubin and Blacki Migliozzi contributed reporting.
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