Five Georgia students rescue a woman and her two children from drowning car
With her two sons accompanying her, Cori Craft had just accidentally driven her SUV into a creek in rural Georgia, and she couldn’t find her phone to summon help as the car rapidly sank.
Thoughts that she and her family could soon drown started to flood her mind. But then she heard a voice call out and ask if she was OK. Her reply that she was not OK was the only thing five college sorority members needed to hear to work together to pull Craft and her boys out – and then resuscitate one of the children by performing CPR on him.
“Without them stopping, I would not have my youngest here,” Craft told ABC News in a remarkably dramatic interview published Wednesday. “I know I would not have been able to get to him in time.”
Craft’s comments to the US news outlet provided the most complete account yet of what authorities have separately exalted as life-saving bravery displayed by University of Georgia students Molly McCollum, Jane McArdle, Eleanor Cart, Clarke Jones and Kaitlyn Iannace on 15 March.
As the five Kappa Alpha Theta sorors recounted to ABC, they were on a road trip of about four hours from their school in Athens to Savannah to celebrate St Patrick’s Day weekend when they detoured through a rural part of the state to stop for lunch on cheese biscuits.
That’s when McCollum said “a spark of white – a little cloud of dust” in the corner of their collective vision caught their attention.
The sound of “a big old crash” soon complemented the strange sight, McCollum recalled, and once assured that they weren’t imagining things, the group decided to pull their car over.
As Jones said, “that’s when we saw the car in the water”.
Craft said she had veered off the road and into the creek there after losing control of her SUV – with her two young sons in the back – while driving through the community of Sardis. Not only was she unable to find her phone as the emergency escalated, but she also couldn’t even see where her glasses were, she said.
“I was thinking … ‘I don’t know how I’m going to call for help,’” Craft said. “And then I just heard them over on the bank, they shouted [asking] if I was OK. And I’m like, ‘No, my kids are in the car.’”
As a screaming Craft squeezed her way out of the SUV through a broken sunroof, the traveling Thetas dialed 911, but they didn’t wait for first responders to arrive. They hopped into the water, aided Craft as she opened one of the doors of the sideways SUV and retrieved the older of her sons.
But Craft’s younger boy – aged four – remained buckled in, completely under water and trapped.
McCollum reported spending up to five minutes struggling with McArdle, Cart, Jones and Iannace to find a way to rescue Craft’s younger boy. They eventually managed to lift him out of the car – yet at that point, a frightening scene greeted them.
The boy’s “lips [were] completely blue”, Iannace said to ABC. “Like his eyes were closed – he was not breathing.”
Luckily for the group gathered in the creek, Jones had previously worked as a lifeguard. She remembered the CPR training she received as part of that job and began administering it to the boy, unsure if it would even make a difference.
“This is the one thing I know how to do that I can help,” Jones said she thought to herself. “And so I’m just going to give it my best try.”
Craft became afraid that her younger child had died. However, suddenly, he began breathing again.
Jones and her friends had saved him. That realization prompted his mother and his rescuers to burst into elated tears.
Local sheriff’s office deputies soon released a statement calling the sorority sisters “amazing”.
“The quick thinking and bravery of these women is absolutely admirable,” said the statement from the agency, which subsequently made the university students honorary deputies. “We are grateful you were in the right place at the right time.”
The Sardis police department issued its own statement declaring that “these five young ladies were the primary factor” everyone in Craft’s SUV emerged from the crash alive.
“The term hero gets said about sports stars and others,” the Sardis police statement added. “But these five are true heroes.”
None of the Thetas seemed all that comfortable embracing the label of hero – or, as ABC dubbed them, “the fearless five”.
“It’s more about … [having] a mindset of altruism and just like searching for [anyone] who needs help in the world around you,” McCollum said in the interview which aired on Good Morning America.
McArdle said: “I think the mom was so frantic that, like, I don’t know – I feel like I didn’t have a choice but to help.”