For 14 years Willie Farrow had delivered mail for the U.S. Postal Service. But one day his routine was broken – he pushed mail through a door drop and saw something he never could have imagined.

Willie Farrow’s mail delivery route took him through the same Winston-Salem, North Carolina, neighborhood every day. But as he pushed letters through one resident’s door drop, he noticed something that he had never seen before – and it was terrifying.

By the start of 2014 Farrow had already logged 14 years working for the U.S. Postal Service. Therefore, many of his day-to-day responsibilities – delivering letters, collecting outgoing mail, leaving packages on doorsteps and so on – had likely become routine.

Farrow also had his set route through Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s fifth-largest city by population. And while proceeding along Country Club Road, Farrow stopped to deliver mail as usual at one of his regular houses. This time, though, there would be a big break from his routine.

Through the mail slot, Farrow could see the woman he usually delivered to, but something was obviously very wrong. She was prone on the ground with her belongings strewn around on the floor, Farrow told TV station WXII 12.

“She was laying on the floor, [and] it looked like a lot of items had been pulled off the shelves,” Farrow recalled. “[It looked like] she was reaching up to try to get up off the floor and couldn’t at the time,” he inferred from the scene.

On top of that, Farrow saw something else that was alarming. “I did notice some blood on the floor area there,” he said. That observation “really… just had me worried that she may have been in danger,” Farrow added.

To make matters worse, the woman was unresponsive. Farrow therefore had to move quickly – and he did. He dialed the emergency services and waited with his customer until ambulances arrived on the scene. The mailman made sure to provide first responders with the woman’s identity, too.

Then an ambulance rushed the woman to the hospital, where she was checked into the intensive care unit. And while she did not want to be identified in the news story covering her rescue, her family nonetheless delivered a message of thanks to Farrow.

In fact, the mailman’s quick thinking had saved his customer’s life, since doctors said that she may have died without prompt care. But Farrow didn’t consider himself a hero after the fact. He told news cameras that he was just “in the right place at the right time.”

Of course, Farrow’s wasn’t the first story of mail carrier heroics. U.S. postmen are known to deliver in any condition, after all. ”Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” the USPS’s unofficial motto reads.

With that as their baseline, it’s remarkable how many postmen and women still go above and beyond the call of duty. And Ivan Crisostomo, a mail carrier working in Sacramento, California, serves as a prime example.

In June 2018 Crisostomo was following his normal route through the state capital’s south side. But, as he told Fox 40, he then “heard this crying, this desperate crying.” And after following the distressing sound, he saw 16-year-old Crystal Allen.

The teen had hidden behind a tree when she got Crisostomo’s attention. Then, she began talking. The mailman recalled, “She started pointing to her arm, saying, ‘They were putting things in me. They were putting things in me. They are coming to get me.’”

It didn’t take father-of-four Crisostomo long to understand what had happened to Allen: the girl had been captured by sex traffickers. But she had also managed to escape and had been hiding from the traffickers when the postal worker had found her.

Allen had been in the grips of her captors for an agonizing three months. She later recalled being drugged and abused for the duration of her time with them. And after Allen had been missing for a quarter of a year, her family feared that they’d never see her again.

But Allen nevertheless found the courage to escape – and she even grabbed one of the criminals’ phones before jumping from their vehicle. The person she called first was her mom, whom Allen had spent months praying she’d get to see again.

Presumably still hysterical, Allen attempted to speak to her mom, Stacy Ohman. But Ohman couldn’t figure out what was happening until her daughter handed the phone over to Crisostomo, who kept his cool.

In fact, like Farrow – who stayed with his customer until the ambulance arrived – Crisostomo promised to look after the person he had found. He told the teenage victim, “Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to take you. I’m here for you. Don’t worry.”

Then, after the unexpected rescue, Crisostomo and Allen were reunited, and she had a chance to personally thank him for what he did. “Ivan is a hero for saving me. Even though he doesn’t think it,” she said.

To Crisostomo – and to Farrow, too – helping others was all part of the job. “We as mailmen have a duty, as human beings, being there, knowing the people. We have a kind of different responsibility… with our neighbors and with the people we serve,” Crisostomo said.