In an Instant

Jae Lowder checked into Alta View Hospital expecting to have a baby, but soon she was caught in a violent hostage crisis. She remembers hearing her baby crying... then gunshots... then silence. It would be 18 hours before Jae would know if a gun-wielding man on a rampage had killed her son Bryan in the nursery. New mom Cindy Tovey could only listen to the scene outside her room unfold in terror since she could not move, temporarily paralyzed from the waist down after a C-section. Like Jae Lowder, she spent agonizing hours wondering if her newborn was dead or alive. Rick Worthington, a father of eight, had burst into the hospital and vowed to start "shooting babies" if he did not find the doctor who performed a tubal ligation surgery on his wife two years earlier. Worthington erroneously claimed the doctor performed the procedure without his wife's knowledge or consent while she was sleeping. Glade Curtis, sharing his story for the first time ever on television, was the doctor Worthington came to kill. He was at Alta View that night and called 911 after doing what he could to get babies out safely. But no one did more to keep moms and babies alive than the nurses, including Margie Wyler, who helped a mom deliver her baby during the crisis, and Karla Roth, who sacrificed her own life in a brave attempt to wrestle a gun away from Worthington. It would take hours before police, hostage negotiators and the SWAT team could apprehend Worthington, who had a bomb at the ready to blow up the hospital.

A tornado hits an elementary school in Oklahoma, and a teacher whose class was impacted shares her harrowing story in the second-season opener.

A marathoner falls in a canyon and breaks her pelvis while out on a training run with her dog, and the faithful canine searches for someone to rescue its injured owner.

A nurse is abducted from her apartment by a man who forces her into his car and robs an auto-parts shop.

A car gets hit by a truck and dangles over a guardrail on a California highway, and rescuers try to save a mother and two daughters trapped inside.

In the second-season finale, college students get trapped when stacks of logs collapse during the construction of a massive bonfire at Texas A&M University.