Person Facts About Rescue

Two boys were caught in a riptide off Panama City Beach, Florida. Their mother, grandmother, and several strangers swam out to help and got trapped too - nine people in total. A man on the beach remembered how ants link their bodies to rescue their young. He started grabbing strangers' hands. 80 people formed a human chain into the Gulf of Mexico and held it for over an hour. Everyone survived.

During the 2022 Buffalo blizzard, Jay Withey knocked on 10 doors begging for shelter. All 10 said no. He smashed a window at Pine Hill School and guided 24 stranded strangers inside. He found cereal in the cafeteria and gym mats for beds. Before leaving, he left a note: "I'm terribly sorry about the window. I had to save everyone. Merry Christmas, Jay." Police put out a call to find him. Not to arrest him. To thank him.

Five train cars passed over Wesley Autrey while he shielded a stranger on the subway tracks. His two daughters, ages 4 and 6, watched from the platform. From under the train he shouted: "Let my daughters know their father's okay."

In 1971, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke's plane broke apart at 10,000 feet over the Amazon. She fell still strapped to her seat. Broken collarbone. Maggots in her wounds. She remembered one thing her father taught her: follow water downstream. She walked for 11 days and found a lumberjack camp. She was the sole survivor of 92.

In 2021, KPMG offered accountant Scott Ruskan a full-time job. He said no and joined the Coast Guard instead. On his very first mission as a rescue swimmer - the July 2025 Texas rising waters - he saved 165 people at a summer camp. He was the only rescuer on scene for four hours.

Hollywood casts Danny Trejo as the villain in over 400 films - because he spent 11 years in and out of prison. In August 2019, he was near a Sylmar intersection when a car ran a red light and flipped an SUV with a baby inside. Trejo crawled in through a broken window, and with bystander Monica Jackson freeing the car seat latch from the other side, pulled the child to safety. He kept the boy calm by yelling "superpowers" together. Hollywood was wrong about him.

Five University of Georgia Kappa Alpha Theta sisters pulled over on a rural Georgia road on March 15, 2024, when they spotted Cori Craft's SUV sinking into Brier Creek - wading in, freeing her and both sons, then watching Clarke Jones drop to her knees and perform CPR on a four-year-old whose lips had turned blue. About a minute and a half later, he opened his mouth and started crying. The sheriff's office made all five honorary deputies.

Harrison Okene was the ship's cook on the Jascon-4 when it capsized in 30 meters of water off Nigeria's coast in May 2013. All 11 of his crewmates died. He survived 60 hours alone in a 4-foot air pocket - in total darkness, in freezing water - before rescue divers arrived to collect bodies. When a diver swam through the flooded cabin with a headlamp, a hand reached out and grabbed him. Okene was alive.

A teenager was drowning in a rip current at Pensacola Beach. Andrew Smith, a fisherman with a seizure disorder who can't swim, was the only person nearby who could help. He strapped a flotation device to his shark-fishing drone and flew it out. First drop missed. A bystander handed him a second float. Second drop - she grabbed it and held on.

A woman drove her SUV into the water behind a Virginia Beach seafood restaurant. The doors wouldn't open. Strangers smashed the windows as it sank. One of them was Jeremy Way - a 17-year Navy rescue swimmer who happened to be eating lunch nearby. He put her in a cross-chest carry and swam her to safety. The SUV vanished moments later.

A sperm whale rammed and sank a British couple's yacht in the Pacific. Maurice and Maralyn Bailey escaped into a rubber raft with almost nothing. They survived 117 days - catching fish with their bare hands, fighting off sharks, and drinking rainwater. A Korean fishing vessel found them 1,500 miles from where they went down.

Eight-year-old Olivia Heid and her 4-year-old brother RJ sled off a ridge and vanish into a frozen New Jersey pond. Kieran Foley, 14, loses a boot in the mud and keeps going barefoot. His four friends link arms behind him on the ice. One by one, he hands both kids down the chain to shore.

A 25-year-old woman was pinned face-down under a Mercedes-Benz at a Manhattan intersection. The rear tire was on her back. Within seconds, nearly a dozen strangers sprinted over and tilted the 2-ton SUV onto two wheels to free her. She crawled out with no broken bones. New Yorkers, apparently.

When a crash on I-30 in Fort Worth ejected a 1-year-old girl and her mother and pinned the baby under the overturned SUV, 20-30 strangers and two police officers lifted the vehicle together. Sgt. Ryan Nichols started CPR on the unresponsive infant while Officer Edwin Bounds cleared her airway. She came back - first a hum, then a cry. Both survived.

When a gray SUV was T-boned and flipped onto its side at a busy Daytona Beach intersection in March 2024, eight strangers - including Army Iraq war veteran Amy Ridgely - ran over and rocked it back onto its wheels in under 60 seconds. The whole rescue was caught on a traffic camera, and Daytona Beach Police called it the spirit of Daytona Beach.

When a speeding GMC truck crashed through a bridge fence and plunged upside down into Utah's Jordan River in 2014, Leo Montoya Jr. was the first person to jump in - then shouted at frozen bystanders until more than a dozen strangers waded in beside him. Together they physically flipped the submerged vehicle upright, held one boy's head above water, and got all three trapped teenagers out alive.

On Labor Day 2021, five men from a halfway house spotted a burning car on Interstate 8 in Lakeside, California - and pulled over while everyone else drove past. Ken and Joan Williamson, ages 92 and 90, had been rear-ended and were trapped inside as the flames spread. The car exploded during the rescue. Every single one of them stayed.

Fousseynou Cisse was a school receptionist in Paris. He edged along a sixth-floor ledge 65 feet up as a neighbor's apartment burned. Through the window he passed six people to safety - two babies, two children, two mothers. On March 24, 2026, France made him a citizen at the Pantheon.

A 73-year-old flower delivery woman in Lawrence, Massachusetts was pinned under a 4,000-pound car when it rolled onto her leg. About a dozen neighbors and police officers lifted nearly two tons off her as she screamed in Spanish, clutching a stranger's leg. She walked out of hospital on her own two feet.

Alison Belsham needed a last-chance stem cell transplant, so doctors searched the world for a match - and found Rachel Rees, a Welsh woman living in Australia who grew up about an hour from Alison's home.