17 year old Samuel didn’t come home one Sunday night.
When he didn’t respond to any of his family’s messages, and posts for information on Facebook didn’t give them any results, they reported their son as missing.
But Samuel’s dad Tony couldn’t sleep, so he went out to search for his son. 30 hours later he found him, trapped in a wrecked car.
The first thing dad Tony did when his son Samuel disappeared was ask his friends if they knew anything. They said that Samuel had been tired when he drove them home on Sunday night, and it was then that Tony felt a terrible gut feeling that he couldn’t shake – that Samuel had been in an accident.
“Everybody was saying he’s probably run away … but that’s just not Samuel,” dad Tony Lethbridge tells The Sydney Morning Herald.
Hired a pilot to search
The family lives in Australia, and Tony knew that it was a race against time to find Samuel’s car out in the wilderness. So he went to a plane hanger, threw his cash on the desk and hired a helicopter and pilot to search for his son.
Tony’s gut feeling told him where they should start searching: around an accident-prone road where a boy had died in a traffic accident a few years earlier.
Saw the car wreck from the air
Just 10 minutes after the helicopter took off, the family discovered a white car wrecked on the side of the Pacific Highway, close to Newscastle, north of Sydney. The exact area Samuel’s dad had led them to. If they’d driven there they may not have seen the car, since the highway is surrounded by thick vegetation. But from the air, it was impossible to miss.
Dad’s rescue
The family recognized the car instantly and landed next to the wreck. Samuel was trapped in the car and wasn’t moving. At the hospital they discovered he had a broken arm and some minor injuries on his legs and back. When he was found, he’d been trapped in the car for 30 hours.
Watch dad Andy talk about the rescue in the news clip below:
This dad found his son before the police did, which shows that nothing goes as far as a family’s love.
Share this story to praise the dad’s smart thinking, and to show that there is always hope!
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