(video)—SPEEGLEVILLE, TX (KXXV) –
A China Spring woman is thanking a motorcycle club after she was stranded on the side of the road in Speegleville with her son who has special needs.
Ashley Ballew was heading to Waco on Highway 6 a few weeks ago to take her son, Benjamin, to therapy. Benjamin has cerebral palsy.
"My van overheated. So I pulled over," Ballew said.
Smoke was coming out of the hood of the car. When she opened the hood, there was brown liquid everywhere.
"We sat there for about 10-15 minutes to cool off. I was going to drive it somewhere because I didn't know what else to do," Ballew said. "I put it in drive and it didn't go anywhere."
Ballew called a tow truck but it was a hot day, and the van was starting to overheat. She decided to get Benjamin out of the car but ran into a problem.
"The ramp went straight at an angle in the ditch and the weeds were to my waist," Ballew said.
She tried to get Benjamin out several different times, but nothing was working.
"I felt helpless. I didn't know what to do," Ballew said.
Little did she know, help was just a few hundred feet away at K&W Bar and Grill right off Highway 6.
"I saw her struggling and that didn't sit well with me," Pablo Ramos III said.
Ramos and a few other guys in the bar, including the owner, noticed Ballew struggling to get Ben out of the car. They rushed over to help.
"I look up and I see three men coming from the access road yelling, 'Stop! Wait,'" Ballew said.
The men picked up Benjamin's chair and carried him across the access road to get to the air-conditioned building to wait for the tow truck.
But the next day, Ramos couldn't stop thinking about what happened.
"It was just tugging at my heart strings. I just didn't like the situation she was in," Ramos said.
Ramos said he was raised by a single mother, too. He wanted to do something he hoped someone would do for his mom in that situation.
He decided he wanted to donate money and went to the other members of the Boozefighters motorcycle club to see if they wanted to help, too. They did.
The motorcycle club collected $600 and the owner of K&W Bar and Grill wanted to help, so he donated $500.
The group didn't know how to contact the mother and son, so they posted on social media. Thanks to mutual friends, they found them.
The men were able to hand-deliver the $1,100 to Ashley and Ben to help with the cost of the repairs for the van.
"I was just floored that there are still people out there who are willing to do those kinds of things for someone they don't even know," Ballew said.
"We did what anybody would do, what any normal person would do. Just help somebody," Ramos said.
