The Jeep Grand Cherokee was on its roof and water had begun seeping in from the creek below when Charlie Polk kicked the cracked windshield.

The 11-year-old couldn’t get through, so he looked until he found a white light and climbed through the small hole.

His mother, Lisa, was upside down and unconscious with her head becoming submerged in the mud as Charlie crawled out and ran toward the nearest home to get help.

“He went up a 30-foot embankment and across the street and said, ‘Will you call my dad? My mom wrecked,’” said Lisa Polk.

Polk can’t remember the events of March 27, but knows her son helped save her life after the Jeep in which they were traveling went off the side of Castleberry Road near Turner Drive about 5:10 p.m.

Covered from head to toe in the mud, she was flown to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta with several broken bones.

A man that Charlie found near the accident held Lisa’s head out of the water to keep her from drowning until the fire department arrived and freed her.

Charlie, her youngest child, was taken by ambulance to the hospital with cuts on his legs from where he crawled out of the Jeep, she said.

Back at home and recuperating, Polk and her son recounted their harrowing tale last week.

The two were less than a mile away from their home in a subdivision off Castleberry Road when the accident happened. They were on the way to his brother’s soccer game, and Charlie had grown concerned.

“I told her because we were going off the road a few times that we should just go home,” he said. “I usually know when something bad is going to happen.”

Lisa said Charlie often worries about her due to her medical conditions, which include epilepsy and diabetes.

“So I just turned around at that white church and headed home,” she said. “I went like 20 feet. I drove across the street and just went straight down. I wasn’t going probably more than 5 mph.”

Because of her epilepsy, Lisa said she drives very infrequently, just a handful of times in the past years.

“Charlie worries about me so much, anybody really, but especially me,” she said.

He has come out in the middle of the night when he hears her awake to make sure she’s not having a seizure, and he helps monitor her blood sugar by making her a sandwich or giving her a shot if she needs it.

Now, he may have been the reason the two are home together after such a scary accident.

“He saved my life,” she said, “He’s done it many times.”