It was a very cold night, Sunday, February 6. Patrick heard his dog barking (狗叫声) in the garage (车库). He went there with some food to quiet it down. Standing in the middle of the garage was a little girl with her body covered by snow, crying. “Please come and help,” she said. “I think my mom is dead. My brother is in the truck.”
After a dinner of pizza at her mother’s house in Alton, Carrion, 26, had bundled (捆绑) her sleepy kids, Averie, four, and Abel, 21 months, into a pickup truck and sleepy home. It was 8 p.m., snow covered the land. few cars were on the road. Suddenly, the truck began to slide (滑动). It rolled (转动) two or three times before come to a stop, tilted into a snow bank on its passenger side. Carrion blacked out. “When I came to, I could hear Abel crying. It was dark, and I couldn’t see anything,” Carrion says. Finally, she managed to push the heavy driver’s door open enough so that the lights turned on. She saw Abel in his seat. His nose was bloody, but he had no other hurts. Averie was nowhere in sight. Carrion called Averie again and again. But there was only silence . Then she called 9-1-1.
Averie had been awake when the truck stopped rolling. The little girl called her mother, but she didn’t answer. Averie wriggled (蠕动) through the broken passenger’s window. She walked a quarter of a mile. A house came into view, she stumbled (蹒跚) out of the snow and into the open garage, and a dog started barking. When she got Patrick’s help, she began to cry . Patrick jumped into his car and went to search for the accident . Up ahead he saw the lights of police cars. “I think I have who you’re looking for,” Patrick told the police.
One thing Carrion is sure of: her daughter’s courage and personality. “Averie is very grown-up for her age ,” she says. “The way she walked all that way to help us… She’s so smart, so brave.”