TRENTON, ONT. - A pastor and his wife are being hailed as heroes after a pulling a 13-year-old parishioner from her family’s flipped car trapped underwater.
The Nissan Juke SUV had somehow slipped into neutral in the parking lot of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Frankford, Ont., on Wednesday night, rolled down an embankment and into the Trent River.
The girl was alone in the car, waiting for her family to leave church.
Hearing the panic from a group of other girls who saw it happen, Pastor Dan Wood, a former volunteer firefighter, and wife Liane quickly ran down the embankment after the car.
They said they jumped into the rapids and tried to free the girl from the vehicle, upside down in the river and quickly filling with water.
The doors were locked, Dan said, so the couple said they tried to smash the passenger window, but couldn’t.
Then a break of luck.
“We couldn’t break the side window so I went around to the back to break the window on the hatch and we were feeling for where the window was, then we realized when the car rolled over, the hatch had popped open,” said Dan.
