After helping lift a car off a North Las Vegas child, Stanford Washburn, at left, returned to the Navajo reservation in Shiprock, N.M., where he was embraced by his uncle, Roger Shaggy. Photo by John Locher.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fifth and last in a series of profiles about Nevadans who in 2006 took risks or made personal sacrifices on behalf of others, setting an example of selfless involvement in mankind.

On a Saturday afternoon in late November, a North Las Vegas girl darted into the path of a late-model Cadillac near Lake Mead and Las Vegas boulevards.

Watching the tragedy unfold were 48-year-old Stanford Washburn and a few other homeless men, all of whom were drinking beer as they sat on a cement wall between a Jack In The Box restaurant and the Silver Nugget Bowling Center.

The car struck the girl, 9-year-old Robyn Rubio, who was then dragged beneath the luxury vehicle's carriage.

With cans of Steel Reserve 211, a high-potency malt liquor, in hand, the vagrants heeded Washburn's cry of "Let's go!" and ran to save the child. Dropping their beer cans in the street, they lifted the 5,000-pound automobile off the girl.

"I feel honored that I was able to help save a life," Washburn said this week in a phone call from New Mexico. "We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and God helped us do it."

At the time of the accident, Washburn, who wears an eye patch and sunglasses after an eye was blown out by a firecracker, lived across the street in a foxhole in a vacant field strewn with old clothes, dead rats, plastic bags, cigarette butts, beer cans and wine bottles.

The Navajo Indian, known to other vagrants as "Chief," took to the road more than 20 years ago when a common-law marriage soured. He worked odd jobs to keep in booze, used food stamps to eat and slept on the ground in cities throughout the West.

Authorities and Washburn have theorized that the girl's other rescuers, some of whom also lived in the vacant field, might have left the scene before police arrived because of outstanding arrest warrants.

"I don't think we could do that again if someone paid us one million dollars," Washburn said weeks later at the Navajo reservation in Shiprock, N.M., where he returned for a rare visit to see family at Christmas. "We just saw a little girl that needed help, and the Lord helped us find the strength."

The strength found by Washburn and the other men to lift the car is "evidence of the supernatural, of the hand of God," Pastor William Douglas Lee told his Navajo congregation during a Shiprock prayer service where Washburn was honored less than a week before Christmas.

When Washburn saw Robyn trapped beneath the car, he felt as though he were staring at one of his daughters, he said.

"I could see them in her eyes from time to time beneath all the blood," Washburn recalled. "I chanted to her, 'Don't go from us. Be well. Just be well.'"

More than a month after the accident, Robyn was released from University Medical Center. Her broken arms had healed, but her pelvis, crushed in the accident, kept her in a wheelchair. Though doctors believe she will walk again, her mother, Tina Rubio, said Robyn "still has a long way to go."

Encased in a metal brace around her abdomen, the child awakened one morning earlier this month to see Washburn in her living room.

"I came back from New Mexico on the bus ... to see with my own eyes that you are OK," he told the girl. "Do you understand that you have a whole life ahead of you? ... God gave you a life to live just like he gave me and others the strength to pull the car off you."

A week ago, Washburn once again left Las Vegas for the Navajo reservation in Shiprock. An anonymous donor, who had read about Washburn's return to Las Vegas to check on the welfare of Robyn, paid for his bus ticket home.

"I have a lot of work to do for my mother and the rest of my family," Washburn said from Shiprock. "I'll be living with my mother and getting a job on the reservation that will allow me to watch my grandson grow up."

Washburn's two daughters and other family members are excited about having him home.

"He's a person who can do a lot of good helping people on the reservation," said Washburn's sister, Louise Collins. "It will be nice not having to worry about him living out on the street where he can get hurt."

A self-described drunk, Washburn said he has had only "a few beers" over the past month to keep from embarrassing his family. He doesn't know how much longer he can hold on before going on a binge.

"I believe I can be a drunk and still be a good man," he said.