Massachusetts soldiers rescue elderly woman stranded for days in New Jersey woods
Soldiers with the Massachusetts Army National Guard rescued an 87-year-old woman stuck in her car for days in the New Jersey woods.
The four soldiers, who were training at the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, found the woman by chance on Monday while looking for a location to conduct recovery training, according to the National Guard.
The soldiers spotted a Cadillac that had become stuck in some soft sand on a wooded tank trail near Highway 539 and honked several times before approaching it.
“At first we didn’t know what to think of it because it was suspicious,” Staff Sgt. Dana Francis of G Company 186th Brigade Support Battalion said in a statement.
According to the National Guard, the car’s windows and doors were open and a sunshade was in the windshield. The woman, slumped in the backseat, was unresponsive when they called out to her.
Francis said the woman was breathing, but there was concern about startling her without medical equipment at hand. The two non-commissioned officers, who are also civilian firefighters, left and found a nearby battalion conducting training and returned to the unconscious woman with two medics.
Sgt. Tommy Coppola said at that point, the woman was just starting to wake up.
“We were thinking the worst when we first started,” he said.
The woman was confused and unable to explain how she came to be stuck there. The only water she had came from passing thunderstorms in heats that reached more than 100 degrees. She had been there fore three days and was suffering from severe dehydration and possibly heat illness, according to the National Guard.
The soldiers provided her with water and oxygen before she was transported by ambulance from the scene.
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