Buffalo Bus Driver Saves Potentially Suicidal Woman Standing on Bridge, Waiting to Jump (VIDEO)

A bus driver in Buffalo, N.Y. may have saved the life of a suicidal woman who was standing on the edge of the guardrail on a bridge, after he gently coaxed her back to safety.

"It didn't seem real because what was going on around, traffic and pedestrians were going by as normal," driver Darnell Barton told CBS affiliate WIVB in the upstate New York town.

Barton was driving along the Scajaquada Expressway on a Friday that seemed much like any other. But as he passed over the bridge, he noticed a woman standing on the opposite side of the railing, seemingly ready to jump onto the 198 freeway below.

With a bus full of passengers, Barton pulled over on the bridge, opened the door and called out to her.

"Ma'am, are you okay?" video surveillance from the vehicle depicts Barton as saying. The woman did not respond, and remained at the edge of the bridge. Barton reportedly called for back up, got out of the driver's seat, and carefully made his way over to the woman.

He approached her slowly, then took hold of one of her arms. The man called "Big Country" by friends and co-workers then wrapped his other arm around her.

"She was distraught, she was distant, she was really disconnected," Barton told WIVB. "I grabbed her arm and put my arm around her and said, 'Do you want to come on this side of the guardrail?', and that was actually the first time she spoke to me, she said yes."

Barton helped the woman over the railing to safety, and sat down with her on the ground for a few minutes, talking to her, until a counselor and a law enforcement official arrived on the scene to take over.

"It was meant to be," Barton stated. "I was supposed to be there for her at that moment and I was. I wanted to convey that whatever it was, I'm going to help you through, and it's not as serious as jumping onto the 198."

When Barton got back onto the bus, commuters gave the former football player a round of applause, CBS reported.

"I feel like I did what I was supposed to do at the time. I'm a football guy, so when you sit the bench, and the coach calls your number, you gotta go in there, make a play, do what the play calls for, and I think that's what I did," Barton concluded.