Dead For an Hour and 41 Minutes: The Incredible Rescue of Baby Gardell
When a neighbor pulls an unconscious toddler from an icy creek, the boy's family fears the worst. But one doctor won't give up hope.
It’s the first warm day of spring, and the March sun pours over the ridge that borders Doyle and Rose Martin’s rural property outside Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania. Yesterday it rained all day, melting the better part of the long winter’s snow, and what the rain left behind, the sun is taking care of today. Water seeps and trickles down the surrounding slopes, swelling the normally humble creeks until they nearly jump their banks. The stream that runs through the Martins’ yard is usually ankle deep and lethargic, but today it is so spring-riled that it courses angrily beneath the footbridge at startling speed, up to a man’s waist and frigid.
The Martin boys will not squander such a lovely afternoon. After the school bus drops them off, they barge outside to ride bikes, gathering sticks to build a fire. They are what people in some circles call free-range kids; the Martins have eight in all [their youngest boy born just this April], and in keeping with their own upbringings, Doyle and Rose expect their children to learn independence and responsibility, the older ones looking after the younger. Today, Gary, 11, and Greg, seven, are playing with little Gardell, who is not yet two. Doyle, a trucker, is out on the road. Rose is working in the kitchen, where she can frequently check on the boys through the window.
Suddenly Greg bursts through the door, his face streaked with tears. “I can’t find Gardell!” he screams. “He was just with me!”
Rose and her two eldest, Gloria and Grace, charge outside, hollering Gardell’s name. Just to make sure, they check the two outbuildings, but everybody is thinking about that raging stream. Rose dials 911, and the girls call their father. The property echoes with the family’s frantic shouts for Gardell, as mother and children scramble along the banks of the brook, sickened by the speed of that icy gray water.
Randall Beachel is washing dishes at his kitchen sink when he looks idly out the window and sees Grace and Gary Martin running alongside the stream where it exits their property. Something’s wrong. Grace is barefoot, no jacket. They’re yelling. He steps outside. “What’s wrong?” he calls to Gary. “We can’t find my little brother!”
Randall’s heart sinks. He runs back inside, tells his wife, Melissa, what’s going on, and pulls on his shoes. Together they rush outside and down the road to where the stream passes through pastureland some eighth of a mile downstream of the Martin place. Randall holds the strands of electric fence wire, ignoring the shocks, as Melissa climbs through. When they reach the brook, Melissa goes downstream and Randall begins following the brook back toward the Martins’, scanning the water’s surface. After a moment, he sees a tiny pair of navy-blue boots partially obscured by brush. A step or two farther, and he sees the whole picture: the little boy, still clad in a hooded snowsuit, hanging bizarrely on his side in the middle of that rushing stream, his face turned away from the current.
Randall plunges into the brook, gasping involuntarily—the water temperature is around 35 degrees—loses his footing, and blunders into a deep hole. Recovers himself. Pulls the limp little body off what turns out to be a grassy underwater knoll. Staggers back to dry land, hollering, “I found him!” even as he turns the kid over to see if he can drain the water from his mouth and lungs. An ambulance is coming up the road. Randall raises an arm, and it stops.
A paramedic comes racing across the field, and Randall hands the little boy off and stands watching as the rescuer rushes back toward the ambulance, performing CPR as he goes. When Randall reaches the road, the ambulance staff have torn off Gardell’s clothes. One of the paramedics has placed a mask onto the little boy’s face and is hand-pumping air into his lungs; the other is rhythmically compressing the tiny chest to force blood through the body. That’s all Randall sees before the vehicle turns around and speeds toward town. As for Rose, she never gets so much as a glimpse of her son.
The CPR has gone on for more than an hour. “If he survives, it will be a miracle,” says a paramedic.
They’re taking him to Evangelical Community Hospital in nearby Lewisburg, she learns. Within minutes, her sister and brother-in-law arrive at the house, and together they speed toward the hospital. As they rush into the emergency room 15 minutes later, Rose is told they’re transporting him by Life Flight to a trauma center. Through the windows of the waiting area she can see the chopper on the heliport, its interior illuminated, medical workers hunched over what must be Gardell’s body. Her brother-in-law is an EMT, and he can tell that they’re still doing CPR in there—after all this time!—but he says nothing