A gasoline station clerk who came to a suburban Detroit girl’s defense when she entered his store and mouthed the word “help” ultimately had a hand in saving the teenager after a stranger had kidnapped her at gunpoint on her way to school, according to authorities.

“I believe this could have [gone] a lot worse than it did,” said police chief Hussein Farhat of Hamtramck, Michigan, at a news conference addressing a rescue partially attributed to convenience store employee Abdulrahman Abohatem. “We have every belief that this could have ended really badly.”

As first reported by the Michigan news outlet WXYZ, the 16-year-old girl at the center of the case was waiting for a school bus in Hamtramck to take her to classes at Frontier International Academy on the morning of 13 April when a gun-wielding man whom she did not know kidnapped her.