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A Seven-Year-Old Boy Saved His Whole Family After Their Truck Flipped
On Thanksgiving 2002, Tammy Hill was driving her three children home from a family dinner when she briefly unbuckled her seat belt to reach into the backseat and retrieve her phone from her eldest, Titus, who had been using it to talk to his father. Because the traffic safety gods aren't above punishing an unbuckling -- even for one second -- Tammy lost control of the truck, which rolled twice before throwing her clear out of sight. At this point, there is exactly one course of action you would expect the children, who were properly buckled, to take: 1) Cry. 2) There is no Step 2.
Seven-year-old Titus, however, tapped into the years of crisis management training he absolutely didn't have. First he checked on his four-year-old and two-year-old sisters. After determining that they were reasonably intact, he set about looking for his mom. "I knew she was out of the truck, and that was all," he later told reporters. He couldn't find her in the dark, and so -- barefoot in the freezing cold -- he ran half a mile to a nearby farm and climbed under an electric fence to find someone who could help. He had to hustle, on account of his normal seven-year-old fear of the dark.
Emergency services were called, everyone was rescued, and Titus held court in a press conference where he answered questions like a grizzled police chief. When asked what lesson he learned from the incident, he said "Nothing." When asked what it felt like when the truck rolled over, he said "It felt like a truck rolling over." He was one dumb question away from explaining that he was just doing his job, ma'am.
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