A mother-of-three who crashed her car into a ditch survived six days by sucking water from her wet jumper.
Brieonna Cassell, 41, was traveling through Newton County, Indiana, when she fell asleep at the wheel and careened off the road last Thursday.
The ditch was so deep it couldn’t be seen from the road. She spent almost a week trapped in the car with serious injuries to her legs and ribs until a passerby noticed the wrecked car.
The passerby Johnny Martinez contacted his work supervisor, local fire chief Jeremy Vanderwall, and the pair checked out the wreck, where they found Cassell conscious and responsive.
Her father Delmar Caldwell told ABC she survived six days without food because ‘she was able to reach the water from the car.
‘She was stuck in the car and could not get out… the only way she was able to survive was using her hoodie and dipping it into the water in a ditch and sucking the water.’
He said she would toss one end of the hoodie as best she could, ‘like she was fishing’, and then reel it back in once it was drenched to suck the water off.
By Tuesday, five days after the accident, she had ‘given up hope of being found.’
Brieonna Cassell, 41, was traveling through Newton County, Indiana , when she fell asleep at the wheel and careened off the road last Thursday
While she couldn’t move and her phone was dead, Cassell could hear cars as they traveled past and tried to scream, but nobody could hear her.
Cassell’s disappearance was widespread knowledge in the town and there was widespread searches in an effort to track her down.
Vanderwall said he had traveled that road three or four times since the crash searching for her and had not seen the wreckage because of how deep the ditch was.
She would toss one end of the hoodie as best she could, ‘like she was fishing’, and then reel it back in once it was drenched to suck the water off
‘To have the wherewithal to use her shirt to get water, knowing that she had to have water to survive … just survival skills, man,’ Vanderwall added.
Newton County Sheriff Shannon Cothran said Cassell’s survival was ‘an incredible testament to her will to live.’
She was airlifted to hospital in a serious condition, but is now in high spirits and ‘eating a lot’, her family said.
