Aussie dad follows hunch to locate injured son
Canberra, Australia, Jan. 16: The father of a teenager who spent 30 hours trapped in a car wreck in Australian woods said on Tuesday he had followed his intuition by hiring the helicopter that found his seriously injured son.
Samuel Lethbridge, 17, remained in a hospital in serious condition with multiple fractures two days after the crash.
His father, Tony Lethbridge, said he suspected his son may have been in a car wreck when he did not return by Sunday night to the family home at Lake Macquarie, after a Saturday night out with friends in Sydney, 130 km to the south.
The father said he hired a helicopter on Monday morning and the car was spotted in scrub off a highway 20 km from home.
Emergency services cut the boy from the wreck 30 hours after the accident, the father said. “Everybody was saying: He’s probably run away and all that kind of stuff. That’s just not Samuel,” Tony Lethbridge told Seven Network television.
The father recalled that a victim of an earlier crash in the area had died after not being found within five days.
“I wasn’t going to let that happen,” he said. Lee Mitchell, the helicopter
pilot and part- owner of Skyline Aviation Group at Lake Macquarie, said he discounted his usual helicopter hire rate of $ 956 an hour when the father explained his plight. “He came in looking anxious and somewhat fatigued and said he needed helicopter bad,” Mitchell told the AP of meeting Tony Lethbridge midmorning on Monday at the Port Macquarie airport. The father said he had reported his son as a missing person to police and explained his fears of a car accident near home. “He just said: ‘ I’ve got A $ 797 on me, will that be enough?’ and we said: ‘ Yes, it would,’” Mitchell said.
The helicopter took off soon after with the boy’s uncle Michael Lethbridge aboard, because the father was prone to air sickness, the pilot said. The car was spotted within 15 minutes of flight, about 20 meters ( yards) off the road, Mitchell said.