A potential tragedy was narrowly averted outside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday morning, when a woman was injured while shielding her two-year-old son after a taxi jumped the curb and drove onto the sidewalk.

Cab driver Mohammad Miah crashed into a lamppost after he lost control of his car. The 20-foot metal post struck Melissa Bernard, who managed to get her son, Bowen, out of the way.

Bernard spoke to the New York Post while receiving treatment for a head wound and a possible concussion at a local hospital. “I was walking up the hill to the Met with my two-year-old son […] and the next thing I knew, the taxi was coming at us pretty quickly,” she recalled.

“Somehow, I must have turned around to pick him up and try to run in the opposite direction,” she said. “The next thing I knew was that I was on the ground.”

Bernard’s husband Adam—who was walking ahead with the couple’s one-year-old daughter in a stroller—said, “The cab jumped the curb […] and came in between where my wife was and where I was, hit the light post, and the light post came down.”

Bowen was not hurt, he said. “He’s shaken up, but he’s fine.”

Miah told the Post that he was forced off the road by another taxi. “This is not my fault,” he insisted. “I was driving my car very slowly.”

“I pressed the brakes, but it’s not enough,” he said. “I don’t know what happened after that. It happened so fast.”

Elyse Topalian, vice president of communications at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reassured visitors in an email to artnet News, “The Met has security and other staff who monitor the public activities outside and around the Museum, around the clock. The safety of our visitors is of paramount importance to us.”