Applying fertilizer to a lawn Tuesday morning on Woodleigh Drive near State Highway 6, Tony Piazza may have appeared to be an ordinary man performing an ordinary job.

But within minutes, Piazza turned into a hero, as his quick thinking likely saved the life of a year-old baby who nearly drowned in a bathtub.

Piazza, a 52-year-old employee with the Sugar Land office of TruGreen Lawn Care, was working in a customer’s yard, his last day of work before going to the hospital to have shoulder surgery. Suddenly, a woman burst out of the back door and ran past him, clutching an infant. He ran after her.

“She was just screaming and crying ‘My baby drowned! My baby drowned!’” Piazza recalled on Thursday. “I said come on, lets go call 911. I held out my arms and she handed me the baby. He was all wet. I thought possibly he had swallowed some water, so I started patting him on the back. And sure enough, he got sick and threw up, all over my shirt. I held his mouth up to my ear, and I could hear him breathing.

“I tell you what, when I saw that baby’s eyes and they were open, I thought, Oh thank you, God!”

Fadia Hadayet, the child’s 38-year-old mother, told Fort Bend County Sheriff’s deputies she was bathing the infant boy and an older sister, and stepped out of the bathroom for “just a matter of seconds.” When she returned, her son was face-down in the bathtub. “The mother stated his face was blue and he was unresponsive,” according to the sheriff’s office. “She grabbed her son and ran outside for help.”

And found a man spreading fertilizer in the yard.

“I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t give him CPR,” Piazza said. “But I was glad I was there, and I did help, I guess. I helped her make some decisions.”

Ambulance attendants took the baby to a hospital for observation, as a precaution, and the sheriff’s office said the boy is expected to fully recover.

The lawn-care worker waited around until it was clear the baby would be OK. Then Tony Piazza went back to work.