(NewsNation) — Two Connecticut barbers are being hailed as heroes after a security camera captured them springing into action to stop a little girl from running into a busy intersection.

“I saw the little child running full speed towards the intersection. I just couldn’t sit here and look to see what’s going to happen,” Osvaldo Lugo said in a Sunday interview on “NewsNation Prime,” describing the dramatic rescue in East Hartford.

Lugo said he was cutting hair at his shop when his coworker Rafael Santana first noticed the girl’s reflection and reacted. Surveillance video shows the two barbers rushing out and grabbing the child just steps away from the road.

“I did it out of that…I’m a dad myself. So it was just a reaction from me just being a dad,” Santana said. “I don’t know about being a hero, I just was there just at the right time.”

The barbers said the girl’s mother was nearby searching for her daughter. When Lugo picked her up, he said the little girl only repeated “Mama, Mama.”

It took Lugo a few minutes to find the parents. He said the mother was at a bus stop and didn’t realize her child was gone.

“It was a recipe for disaster,” Lugo said of the near-tragic situation, noting the shop’s location on a high-traffic corner. “I’m here every single day, and I know this area, I know the traffic.”

While downplaying being called heroes, the barbers emphasized the dangers the girl could have faced and their instinctive need to protect a child, with Lugo saying “nothing good” would have happened if they hadn’t intervened.