Angels All Around

Fishermen, acting on gut, find crash site, 2 girls

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — As their mother lay dead in the middle of the night, a 4-year-old Oregon girl dragged her seriously injured younger sister from a crashed car and the two huddled under a blanket — and waited.

With the mangled car stuck deep in the woods, and no skid marks on the highway, the crash site was nearly impossible to detect.

In fact, authorities estimate the sisters were alone in the frigid woods for several hours early Wednesday as many motorists passed it by.

The children finally got help after two commercial fishermen spotted what appeared from a distance to be a basketball-sized gash in an alder tree along State Highway 401 between Astoria, Ore., and Naselle, Wash. Kraai McClure and Scott Beutler travel the two-lane road frequently, and had a gut feeling something was wrong

"I don't know exactly what told us to turn around, but I'm just really thankful we did," McClure said Thursday.

The men spotted the wrecked car a few hundred feet from the road. Nearby were the two young girls, scared and confused. "They could say their names but were totally in shock," McClure said.

The Washington State Patrol said the girls' mother, 26-year-old Jessica Rath of Astoria, probably was asleep when she veered off the road and struck the tree shortly after midnight. She died at the scene.

McClure and Beutler discovered the crash site around 8:30 a.m.
Winger described the fishermen as heroes for acting on their hunch. McClure, however, gave the credit to Aryanna for helping Lylah out of the car and keeping her warm.

"She saved her sister," McClure said. "She was sharp enough. I don't know how she did it or anything else, but something was watching over those little girls."

"It was amazing that the little 4-year-old — I have a little 4-year-old, too, she's almost 5 — was able to get her little sister out and do that," he added. "It just blows my mind that she could do that in that situation. I don't know if she waited until morning, when they could see, but, you know, it just makes me want to cry."
[link to news.yahoo.com]