A man who had been trapped for days in his crashed pickup truck was rescued when two fishermen spotted the wreckage along Interstate 94 near Portage, Ind. Tuesday afternoon.
Nivardo Delatorre and his father-in-law Mario Garcia said they were walking along Salt Creek, scouting fishing spots, when they saw the truck under an overpass.
They looked into the truck and found Matthew R. Reum, 27, pinned inside. Garcia said they thought he was dead and reached out to touch him when Reum woke up, turned his head toward them and began to speak.
“He had a jacket almost like mine and all I seen was this part, the shoulder,” Garcia said. “The moment I touched the shoulder, he swung around. He woke up.”
Reum told the men he had been trapped since Dec. 20. His truck had gone off the interstate ahead of a bridge over Salt Creek, missing the guardrail and likely rolling several times before landing on the other side of the creek, hidden out of sight from the road above, according to the Indiana State Police.
Reum said he had screamed and yelled for help, but only heard the “quiet sound of water,” according to Garcia. Reum told them his cell phone had fallen out of reach and his body was trapped, preventing him from calling for aid.
Reum, from Mishawaka, Indiana, was freed by first responders working under bright floodlights, then airlifted to a hospital in South Bend with life-threatening injuries, according to Indiana State Police Sgt. Glen Fifield.
“Quite frankly, it’s a miracle that he’s alive. In this weather, we’ve been lucky enough here this Christmas season that our temperatures have been, as you all know, above normal.” Fifield said during a press conference. “So that was working in this individual’s favor.”
Delatorre told reporters, “We were put there for a reason.”
Portage is about 31 miles southeast of Chicago.
