Naperville Man's Life Unravels, But He Rises To The Occasion At Roadside Wreck

(CBS) -- He had to rush away from his uncle's' funeral, because his house caught fire. Then a Naperville man's day got even worse when he witnessed a deadly crash.

Amazingly, that's when he stepped up, coming to the rescue of a family of nine trapped in a flipped over van Wednesday night.

CBS 2's Audrina Bigos reports.

Mike Robertson walked into his townhome for the first time since it was ravaged by a fire while he was away at his uncle's funeral in downstate Illinois.

His cat was killed in the blaze, and everything is covered in soot. Barely anything is salvageable.

With all of that on his mind, Robertson headed home from the funeral.

On Interstate 57, he saw a van swerve off the road into a ditch.

"I could just hear screaming kids and I could see hands out the back window, and then I saw the mothers face. She was hanging upside down," Robertson says.

He started pulling the kids out the windows. When he found the mother of the children, she wasn't breathing.

"I told her daughter to start blowing into her mouth because there were still more people in this van and all I could think the whole time was how many people are in here?" he says.

It was a family of nine. Exhausted, he ran back to the interstate and flagged down a motorist, who called 9-1-1. Firefighters responded within minutes, got the rest of the family out and rushed them to the hospital.

"I was put there for a reason," Robertson says of the chance encounter.

Some sad news: The father who was in the accident has died. The mother was in serious condition.