Dolores Diaz Lopez sprang into action after a man snatched her 5-year-old son off a New York City street.
The NYPD released surveillance footage of the failed abduction attempt.
The child was running steps ahead of his mother and siblings when a man sitting in a nearby car snatched him and threw him into the backseat.
Lopez tried to grab her son as she and her children ran to the car and tried to ppen the door. and pulled her son through the open window as the suspect attempted to drive off with the boy.
On Friday, police arrested James McGonagle, 24, of Queens, the NYPD tells PEOPLE in an email.
He is charged with attempted kidnapping, reckless endangerment, and acting in a manner injurious to a child less than 17, the NYPD says.
Police say an unidentified man in the passenger seat is still at large. He is described as a white middle-aged man with a bald head.
Lopez, 45, told ABC 7 Eyewitness News she was on her way to visit her husband at work with her children when McGonagle tried to abduct her son, Jacob.
“I said, ‘Oh my God my kids, oh my God my boy,'” Diaz Lopez told ABC7.
She said the car door was locked when she tried to open it.
But her son stood up in the car, enabling her to yank him out of the window to safety, she told ABC7.
McGonagle and the other suspect sped off before she could look at the license plate number.
Lopez said she was prepared to take quick action to save her son.
“You have to do what’s necessary, no matter what,” she told ABC 7. “The car was just parked there. I would never have imagined that a man would get out of the car and grab my son.”
