A 20-year-old man has been reunited with the woman who saved his life just hours after he was born. Matthew Christian Whitaker recently met up with 58-year-old Azita Milanian, exactly two decades after she pulled him from the clutches of death.
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Milanian discovered the tiny baby buried in the dirt during an evening hike in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Mountains on May 16, 1998. ‘
“I was waiting for you. Twenty years,” Milanian told Whiteaker of finally meeting him, as she wiped away tears of joy. “You’re exactly what I’ve imagined. I guessed your size, everything. Thank you for coming into my life, you changed my life.”
The powerful reunion was recorded live during an appearance on On Air with Ryan Seacrest last Thursday.
“I knew we were going to connect again,” Milanian said. “The day I met him he confirmed my faith … God brought us together for a purpose.”
“Thank you,” Whitaker told his rescuer. “Thank you, you’re an angel.”
Milanian explained the extraordinary series of events that led her to discover Whitaker in an interview with radio host Ryan Seacrest.
Despite having a strict routine and a set route that she ran every single day, for some reason, on that fateful day in 1998, she chose to shake things up a little.
“I was going to run 20 minutes and suddenly I felt like I was going to be sick, like someone was choking me or throwing up, and I think it was exactly 10 to 15 minutes before that they were [burying Matthew],” Milanian recalled.
At the end of her run, as she and her three dogs were headed back to the car, she says they suddenly bolted off and started sniffing off the trail.
“I went there and heard a noise and … Tango [the dog] was standing exactly over his head and I was saying, ‘Come on, let’s go! What are you looking at?’ And they wouldn’t move and I’m screaming at them and it was a bunch of bushes and suddenly Christian’s feet came out of the ground in front of my feet,” she explained.
Though she was shocked, Milanian knew she had to act fast. She sprinted her dogs back to the car and returned to where the baby lay. She recalled frantically digging, and finally unearthing the little child, who still had his umbilical cord attached and was buried in the dirt, wrapped in a blanket and left for dead.
“I didn’t even know if it was boy or a girl and he was crying and I brought him out and I dug my nails in his nose and mouth and started taking the dirt out and all I said to you was, ‘Please don’t die. I will never leave you. I love you,'” Milanian recalled through tears.
Azita rushed back to the car with the defenseless child, and immediately dialed 911. The emergency services, believing that the child was dead, were slow to arrive. But that wasn’t going to stop this little fighter.
“He grabbed my wrist like this and he wouldn’t let go. … He was so strong,” Milanian demonstrated. “He was so strong-willed. We are both Tauruses — stubborn,” Milanian said. “Nobody can get rid of us!”
Whitaker was eventually transported to hospital for treatment — and made a full recovery. The strong little man was later put up for adoption, only discovering the true story behind his survival about a year ago.
“I was in the car with my godmom and she was like, ‘Has anyone ever told you the true story of how you were found?’ And I was like, ‘No’ and she was like, ‘Legend has it …’ and then she told me the story and I was just in awe and then I went home and did research and then I started telling everyone because I felt so cool that I survived the impossible,” he said.
Whitaker is now a junior at the University of Arizona, majoring in journalism. He has dreams of becoming an entertainment lawyer one day.
(H/T: The Daily Mail)