5-Year-Old Girl Saves Mother, Brother After Car Accident

A stock photo shows an ambulance with lights flashing. (Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

A 5-year-old girl was hailed as a hero for crawling 40 feet up the side of a creek to get help after her mother crashed her car, which left the woman with a broken back and her brother with head injuries.

Angela Shymanski was driving Lexi, 5, and Peter, who was 10 weeks old, from Calgary, Canada, to Prince George, British Columbia, when she passed out behind the wheel and crashed her SUV into a tree, according to MailOnline.

Her daughter, Lexi, awoke unscathed and found her mom unconscious and her brother crying. The mother, it was later revealed, had a broken back, and Peter had a bleeding brain.

The crash, located near Jasper, Canada, could not be seen from the road, according to the CBC.

But somehow, Lexi managed to remove her seat belt and climbed up the rocky embankment of a creek to flag down other motorists.

“It’s crazy,” Angela told The Metro.

“I only can remember one or two times where she got out of her five-point harness previously. She somehow got out, adrenaline or whatever, and barefoot hiked up the embankment,“ she added. “It’s crazy because the guy who came to see us in the hospital, he said the medics and the firemen needed ropes to get up and down that embankment, and she did it barefoot.”

“It was only because she came up and flagged people down that anybody would have stopped.”

The first driver to stop for the family also happened to be a paramedic.

“It took him five tries before he could get cell service to call 911,” Angela said, according to People magazine.

The three were airlifted to a hospital in Edmonton.

A GoFundMe for the family was set up for the family to deal with medical costs.

Her daughter, she said, still has nightmares of the incident.

“Even now, a month and a half later, I still can’t believe what she was able to do. [She] climbed up 12 metres of a steep embankment. She was in bare feet,” Angela told the CBC.

She credits parenting for her daughter’s willingness to help.

“Teaching her independence and teaching her the difference between bad strangers and good people, good strangers,” she said.

The girl wasn’t injured in the incident, according to the Prince George Citizen.

“Once Lexi was home and started doing her gymnastics and after her swimming lessons she was saying her neck was sore,” said her mother.

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“For Lexi it’s more emotional trauma,” said Angela.  “She’s had nightmares but I’m hoping when things settle down those will disappear. I carry major guilt over this whole thing.”

Meanwhile, Angela said she had to be resuscitated several times on the ambulance trip from the crash site to an Edmonton-area hospital.

“I was in pretty rough shape when I got to the hospital,” said Angela. “I had small fractures in my neck and upper back, and then I had broken ribs and internal injuries. The spleen had to be taken out and my liver was really badly damaged but they took all my organs out to check for rips and tears and the very next day they were going to do back surgery on me but a girl who was in a motorcycle accident, whose entire back was broken, was given surgery instead,” she said.

Peter, the baby, was also treated in the hospital, the CBC reported.