Cliffhanger
The two men almost look as if they were posing for an artist – one cradled in the other’s arms, a skyward expression on his face. But pull back on the photo and you’ll see the far more reasonable explanation for the scene. One man is actually pulling the other through the window of the SUV that is perched perilously on a cliff nine metres above a busy road.
Jason Warnock, then 29, is the man making the life-saving manoeuvre. He was driving in Lewiston, Idaho, in April 2015 when he came upon a fallen tree in the middle of the road. “I was like, What the heck?” he told KXLY.com. Warnock looked up the side of a cliff to where the tree should have been and saw an SUV teetering on the edge, held back from plummeting to the road by a flimsy, heavily damaged chain-link fence. Warnock could see a panicked Mathew Sitko, 23, beating on the passenger-side window from the inside of the car.
That’s when Warnock sprang into action. According to NBC News, he crossed a nearby pedestrian footbridge, scrambled up the cliff and traversed an embankment to get to the vehicle.
When Warnock reached the car, he
tried breaking the window but soon realised that this caused the car to shake, and might cause it to slip down the hill. He stopped, then focused on calming Sitko enough to get him to open the window.
“Give me your hand,” Warnock said, according to the KXLY.com report. “If this thing goes, I want to have a hold of you so I can at least snag you out of there.” Before reaching for the lifeline,
Sitko had one request: “Can I grab my iPod?” Soon enough, Warnock had freed both man and his machine.
According to Lewiston police, the accident was caused when Sitko, who suffered only minor injuries, lost control of his car.
For his part, Warnock insisted he came to Sitko’s aid for one simple reason: “I just did what anyone would do.”