A five-year-old girl was probably responsible for saving the lives of her younger brothers after a tragic car crash took their parents’ lives on Christmas morning.
The three children miraculously survived the car wreckage for two days in the hot Australian summer weather after the Christmas day car accident.
The children, along with their parents, Cindy Braddock, 25, and Jake Day, 28, attended a party in Northam, Western Australia which they left at around 1 am on Sunday, Christmas Day.
The family was on their way home to Kondinin, a small town about 124 miles away from the party site, when their SUV crashed and rolled into an embankment. Their relatives got worried when the young family had not returned home for over 12 hours after they had started their journey.
Police were notified and a missing person report was filed on Monday afternoon.
A relative searched the travelers’ route and found the couple’s Land Rover Discovery six miles from their home. He discovered the bodies of the parents, Braddock and Day, in the wreckage of the car on Tuesday afternoon.
When authorities arrived, they pronounced the parents dead at the scene. The children were found with stable injuries and dehydration but they had miraculously survived the accident and had been on their own for more than 48 hours.
Michael Read, a cousin, said that the five-year-old girl’s survival instincts had probably saved the lives of the two younger boys. According to the cousin, the girl’s seatbelt loosened and she was able to move around. She removed her one-year-old brother from his car seat, but she was unable to remove the seatbelt of the two-year-old. The three children stayed in the car for more than 48 hours in the 86-degree heat.
The cousin noted that it would have been hard for the kids to stay inside the car for the whole time, adding that no one knows what horror and pain they went through.
Read believes if the boy’s seatbelt was unfastened, he might not have made it. He said the three kids were injured but they were stable and would be discharged in a couple of days.
A gas station attendant in Northam might have been the last person to speak to the parents when they stopped at the station at 1 am on Christmas day. He said they stopped for fuel at the station, used the bathrooms, and bought snacks and drinks before leaving in their SUV.
O’Donnell said they looked tired and that although Day told him the drive was a couple of hours, he did not buy any coffee.