A British mother faced an agonizing choice over which child to save after a freak accident in which the car she was driving hit a pothole and plunged off the road into a dike.
Rachel Edwards, 39, was at the wheel of the silver Citroën Xsara, with her son Jack Brennan, 16, riding in the front seat and daughter, Isabella, two, behind him when the car veered off the road.
Ms. Edwards, who is six-months-pregnant, escaped through an open window as the car sank in more than two metres of water.
Then she dived back down and groped for the toddler.
“I saw the bottom of the car so I shoved my hands under and I felt her car seat. I pulled her out and I knew she was still alive,” she said.
“I tried to go back for Jack, but I knew if I let go of Isabella then I wouldn’t be able to get her back,” she told the Derby Telegraph.
“The last thing I remember about my son is, as the car was going down, he put his hand on my arm like he was protecting me.
“I was just screaming and screaming.”
Jack was trapped because his mother had earlier asked him to shut the window in case the breeze upset Isabella who was sleeping behind him.
Paramedics pulled the teen from the vehicle and took him to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
“The ambulance crew would not let me get back in to save him,” Ms. Edwards said.
“Since then, I have spent every waking moment thinking how I could have saved both my children.”
Also in the car were two teenaged friends of Jack’s who managed to escape.
“It’s a hard think to put into words,” said Jack’s dad, Carl Brennan, who lives in Derbyshire and is separated from Ms. Edwards.
“You don’t think you would ever have to bury your child.”
The family who live in Dunmow, north of London, were driving to Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire, to visit relatives for a summer holiday when the accident happened.
More than 300 people attended Jack’s funeral in Dunmow.
“The nicest thing about the funeral is that people were lining down the streets to pay their respects,” his mother said.
“I was surprised at how many people turned up. I didn’t realize he had touched to many people. I can imagine he was looking down and thinking, ‘What a spectacle this is.’ ”
Ms. Edwards is due to give birth to her third child, a boy, on Nov. 21, three days after what would have been Jack’s 17th birthday.
Lincolnshire police are still investigating the accident, which happened on Aug. 19.
“There is still lots of work to be done to establish what the circumstances were and what happened,” a police spokeswoman told the BBC.
“We will look at the causes to see if anyone was responsible. That’s not to say if someone was at fault there would be any further action — that would be up to the Crown Prosecution Service.
“They need to get to the point where they know what happened on that day and that’s an ongoing thing.”
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