Posted on 10/01/2011 10:56:13 AM PDT by Auntie Mame
David Lavau, age 67, missing for six days, was found alive and well by his grown children who formed their own search party to find their father. They reported him missing to the authorities after he'd been missing for five days and on the sixth day formed their own search party.
The children drove the desolate stretch of road they suspected their father had driven, stopping at the dropoffs calling their father's name, and at one place they heard a faint, "Help, help," and amazingly, it was their father! The state of his car after plunging so many feet was enough to make them realize it was lucky he even survived the crash, much less surviving for six days, alone at the bottom of a ravine with broken bones and listening to the sound of cars passing by just beyond reach.
But that is not the end of the story.
Alongside his car was another crashed car which was from a completely separate accident and contained a badly decomposed body.
They didn’t know who had died in the other car, but as is mentioned by another Freeper above, and wasn’t known at the time the man was rescued and the first news report came out, it was an 88 year old man who had been reported missing 10 days before.
At this link: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/09/30/man_survives_for_days_after_car_plunges_off_cliff/
is a very good two page article that gives more information on the 88 year old man, but this information was just recently known, it took them a while to figure out who he was.
Actually, they WERE on their toes. No one knew where he was, he could have taken a trip to Las Vegas for all anyone knew. But his children didn’t report him missing—didn’t even figure out he had been missing—until the fifth day.
Once the children found him, emergency services jumped on it and he was whisked away to a hospital.
I love a happy ending. ; - )
Imagine if these were each DUI’s, by the time any attention was paid, there’d be no evidence.
Michael Hedges, the guitarist, was found dead days later by a road crew after he went over the side ...
http://www.nomadland.com/APobit.htm
and one from my town just 3 weeks ago ...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2776590/posts
Trapped and Dying, Kerrville Man Writes His Will on Car’s Console
Each one of the children thought the other had spoken to him, I think he had four kids, and it took a while for them to all get together and realize none of them had seen or heard from him.
I think of it as like child 1 calls and leaves a message, talks to child 2 mentioning in passing that they'd left a message for dad and hadn't heard from him, child 2 calls dad and leaves a message, and so on until they all realize no one has seen or heard from dad for a while. Then they take a day to mull it all over, go over to his house, look around, have another family conference, and the next day they file a police report and start getting serious.
But what a great story. And with a happy ending, at least for them.
Wow. Great stories, too bad the guitarist didn’t make it and glad to see the Kerrville man did.
I once knew a man who said he had been trapped in a car, I think he said it was for about six days before he was found. I was never sure if it was true, but after reading all these stories I now think it must have been. It seemed to define his life up to that point and he talked about it a lot.
Oh, that’s awful. I hope he didn’t suffer. For those of us who live in cities or suburbia, the fact that there is barren, desolate land in America, and so much of it, is hard to wrap our minds around.
“Sounds like a Twilight Zone Episode. At the end they would pan over to the other car with the dead guy in it.”
Can’t be, it has a happy ending.
A twilight zone episode would have them switch bodies.
or at the very least a payphone.
I’m assuming you’ve never ridden mountain roads out west? And are not aware of how extensive the ‘guardrail’ would have to be? Those roads are built into the mountainside, narrow lanes, sharp curves, with no room for error, straight down drops of hundreds of yards. Sure put this easterner’s heart in mouth. Spectacular views, tho.
Thanks Auntie Mame.
Cue Paul Shanklin: “In a Yugo”.
Oh, sure, they can’t guardrail the whole thing. But this must be a bad spot, if two cars went over in the same place.
I remember driving along the French Riviera many years ago, and they only had selective guardrails. That was pretty scary, too, especially if you met a bus coming the other way. But great views.
Actually the dirt roads in our vicinity here in Vermont have similar problems, if not so dire. Deep drainage ditches where the car is certain to flip, and steep downhill verges. They can only afford to put guardrails on the worst bits, but that’s better than nothing.
Perfect analogy!
“For those of us who live in cities or suburbia, the fact that there is barren, desolate land in America, and so much of it, is hard to wrap our minds around.”
the Bureau of Land Management says that only 4.3 percent of the US is developed.
America is profoundly empty of people.
There is a lot of it. I live in a very remote area where a lot of tourists come to visit and every year some of them disappear. They just found the skeletons of some German tourists missing for over 9 years.
Yes. They seem to be life-changing experiences for those that live thru them. None of us get out of this world alive but those that come that close to losing everything seem to find an appreciation for life the rest of us don’t quite understand. I like the ones where they live thru it much better. ;o)
Don’t know as I’d be so hasty to judge ! There’s recently been two such incidents on a major E-W national corridor in NJ ! In one the only reason the wreck was discovered was a driver stopped to relieve himself.....
Regardless, the devotion and actions of his family speak well of and for the man ! They “worked the case” in the best traditions of police/rescue; and succeeded ! He has a family to be proud of ! >PS
This reminds me of something that happened within a couple of miles of my home over thirty years ago. A young man failed to show up for work and no one saw him for three or four days. His family started looking along the roads he might have driven and the car was found in thick bushes just a few feet down from the road surface. There is a creek there which is the county line and he had come down a grade leading into a left hand curve where the road crosses the creek and there were skid marks where he had left the road in his Corvette on one side of the creek and landed in the bushes on the other side in the next county. I happened to come along as the body was being retrieved from the car.
The story I heard later was that he had been up all night at a card game and had left the game when he suddenly realized he was going to be late for work and was driving fast trying to make it to work on time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.