At 10 o'clock on a Friday night in March
last year Jennifer Groesbeck veered off a road in northern Utah as she drove
back from dinner at her father's home and hurtled into the icy waters of the
Spanish Fork river.
What caused her to swerve remains a mystery
but, unluckily, the front wheel of her car caught the edge of the bridge's
concrete wall, causing the vehicle to flip over it and crash down into the
river. It landed upside down in the shallows with such force that the
windscreen was blown out and the roof crushed as if it had been cardboard.
Out of sight from the road, the red Dodge
hatchback sat in chest-high foaming water for 14 hours until it was spotted by
an angler, who reported seeing a hand dangling out of a broken window.
Four local police officers arrived first,
their sense of urgency captured by the body camera one of them had switched on
and whose footage has since been watched thousands of times on the internet.
They dash into the water - so cold that a
total of seven policemen and firemen were later treated for hypothermia - and
desperately try to get inside the crushed vehicle. Then, about two minutes into
the body camera footage, its microphone picks up the faint sound of an adult
voice, sounding urgent. It is unintelligible on the footage but appears to be a
plea for help as Officer Jared Warner responds: 'We're helping, we're coming.'
Something very odd had just happened,
although the emergency responders weren't to realise it at the time. With
visibly new urgency, the rescuers turned the waterlogged car on to its side and
discovered the 25-year-old driver was long dead.
But there was a baby in the back
seat, Mrs Groesbeck's 18-month-old daughter, Lily. Upside down and strapped
into a child seat that had kept her out of the water and - crucially - kept her
clothes dry, she had remained there for an age, her face suspended just above
the churning river.
Unconscious and suffering from
hypothermia, Lily was successfully revived at hospital.
Her miraculous survival made
headlines around the world, and it wasn't until later that the four policemen
discussed those frantic minutes and realised there was something very puzzling
about them.
If the mother had died in the
initial impact of the crash and the baby was unconscious, whose was the female
voice they each swore they had heard coming from the car?
One of those policemen, Tyler
Beddoes, believes he knows the answer: Lily was saved by a heavenly guardian
who had comforted her during that bleak, freezing night in the half-submerged
car and then called for help as her life hung in the balance.
In a new book, Proof Of Angels,
Beddoes - an officer with ten years' experience - describes how the rescue has
solidified a religious faith he previously hadn't really felt.
One doesn't have to be a sceptical
atheist to wonder whether someone might be trying to find a religious message
here that isn't warranted. Beddoes is a Mormon, a religion that believes we all
have a guardian angel.
The Lily Groesbeck case,
nevertheless, defies any easy explanation. One impressionable or superstitious
officer could decide to believe he heard a mysterious voice. But four witnesses
are harder to dismiss, especially with video footage capturing a muffled voice
and the officer's response to it.
Quizzed later, each of the
rescuers concurred in what they had heard.
Officer Bryan Dewitt said: 'We
were down on the car and a distinct voice says: 'Help me, help me.' '
Jared Warner, the policeman who
was in the video saying they were doing their best, said a few days later: 'All
four of us can swear that we heard somebody inside the car saying 'Help'.'
'I think it pushed us to go
harder a little longer. I don't think that any one of us had intended on
flipping a car over that day.'
Beddoes soon became the spokesman
for the four, as his colleagues grew wary of being labelled as naive - or mad.
Source: UK Daily Mail
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