‘From terrified to ecstatic’: Australian dad with a hunch hired a helicopter and found his injured son in a car wreck
The teenager had been trapped in a car wreck in the bush for 30 hours
The father of a teenager who spent 30 hours trapped in a car wreck in Australia said on Tuesday he had followed his intuition by hiring the helicopter that found his seriously injured son.
Samuel Lethbridge, 17, remained in a hospital in serious condition with multiple fractures two days after the crash.
His father, Tony Lethbridge, said he suspected his son may have been in a car wreck when he did not return by Sunday night to the family home at Lake Macquarie, after a Saturday night out with friends in Sydney, 130 kilometres (80 miles) to the south.
The father said he hired a helicopter on Monday morning and the car was spotted in scrub off a highway 20km (12 miles) from home.
Emergency services cut the boy from the wreck 30 hours after the accident, the father said.
“Everybody was saying: He’s probably run away and all that kind of stuff. That’s just not Samuel,” Tony Lethbridge told Seven Network television.