Imagine this: you are a father who has just been awarded full custody of your newborn baby girl. The child’s estranged mother has given birth in another city, so you must travel by plane to retrieve your daughter. All is fine until the two of you prepare to board the plane; instead of letting you fly, the airline says that you cannot go anywhere. You know no one in this city and you don’t have the cash to wait until matters get sorted out.

Sounds like the plot of a movie, right? Well, this exact situation happened to a man by the name of Rubin Swift. He gained custody of his newborn daughter, Andrea, right when the baby was born, but when Swift arrived at the airport with the four-day-old, to bring her from the hospital in Phoenix and back to his home in Cleveland, he ran into a major issue; Frontier Airlines would not let him on board without a birth certificate.

This, of course, is a major problem as birth certificates can sometimes take days or even weeks to be issued. This means that he would be stuck in Phoenix, alone, with little resources and with a newborn to boot. In an interview with People, Swift explained the nightmarish scenario.

“I was out of money and the hospital told me that I wouldn’t be able to get a birth certificate for seven days,” the new dad said. “I was worried that if security saw me sleeping at the airport with a newborn, they’d take her away from me and charge me with neglect. I was stuck.”

Rubin’s wife Tiffany was back in Cleveland when she got the news of the birth certificate issue. Unsurprisingly, she, too, was panicked. “When he called me from the airport and told me that they weren’t going to let him fly until he could get a birth certificate in four days, I felt panicked,” she remembered “We didn’t have the money for a hotel room or a rental car and I didn’t want him to sleep at the airport. I was scared because it looked like we were out of options.”

So, Swift called the only person he knew in the area, a kind hospital volunteer, working in the newborn intensive care unit at Banner University Medical Center where his daughter had just been delivered. The woman, 78-year-old, Joy Ringhofer, told him right away that she was coming to pick him up. He and his little daughter would be staying with her until they could get back on a plane to Cleveland.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Swift said. “I’m black and she is white. I’m a stranger who grew up in the projects in the Bronx and she’s a great-grandmother who recently lost her husband. She knew very little about me, and yet, she took me in. Color wasn’t an issue to her. She showed me that in this crazy world, there is still compassion.”

In the same People interview, Ringhofer explained that she knew Swift was a person to be trusted and that she was happy to open up her home to him and his daughter. “There are a lot of dangers out there,” she admitted “but there’s a lot of good, too. I’d enjoyed talking to Rubin at the hospital and helping him with the baby. He was polite and kind and I could tell that he had a good heart.”

In the four days that it took before Rubin and his baby could board the flight, the new friends had a lot of great conversations and even visited the grave of Ringhofer’s late husband who had passed away just months prior.

Amazingly, the unlikely roommates say that they have walked away from the experience better people. They now keep in touch regularly via FaceTime. Both say they are grateful for having met and cared for one another during tough times.

If that’s not a heartwarming story, we don’t know what is! To learn more and to meet Swift, Ringhofer, and baby Andrea, be sure to watch the video below.

We’d love to hear your take on this story. Were you moved by it? Has something similar ever happened to you? If so, did you make a lifelong friend from it?