A 13-year-old boy in Marissa, Illinois survived being sucked a half-mile down a storm drain during a flood that took place in the state this past weekend.
“It was raining, and we were just out here playing — I was going to grab a ball and went underneath,” said the teen, Sebastian Calderon, according to WGN. “When I first went in, I started to pray.”
He added of the drain that “It was pitch black, so I couldn’t see anything.”
A neighbor, Christy Stoddard, who saw Calderon get sucked up also fell into the water while trying to rush to the boy’s aid. Her husband managed to pull her to safety before she was swept into the same drain.
“We’re sitting on the deck just kind of watching it and it goes that quick,” Stoddard said. “So, we see the boys come through and he says something about those kids are going to fall in that creek and it was no sooner than that came out of his mouth when Sebastian went down and it was just chaos.”
One of Calderon’s friends, Xavier Trammeal, was with him at the time.
“I was scared because I didn’t know what happened, and I didn’t know if he was going to be alive or not,” said Trammeal.
Speaking to KSDK, officials say the boy went at least half-a-mile before making it out of the drain. Awaiting him at the end of the drain was a local firefighter. When he got to that point Calderon was reportedly “alert and oriented.”
“I got scratches on my hands and knee, and that’s about it,” the teen said.
He added he had some scratches on the back of his head that came when he “tried to go up and get a breath.”
Earlier on the same day a 12-year-old girl in St. Louis, Missouri, Aaleya Carter, tragically died when her family’s car was sucked into a storm drain as the driver reportedly tried to reverse direction to avoid the floods. St. Louis is 40 miles northwest of Marissa. Her mother, brother and sister all survived the same incident.
