‘Angel’ is a hero

Written by Sherri Gallant - Lethbridge Herald
Friday, 23 October 2009

The driver of a sanding truck working in the Crowsnest Pass on a recent icy morning couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the tiny figure at the side of the road, waving her arms to flag him down.

Little Mary Butler, five years old, had just hiked some 45 metres up a steep ravine after the truck her mother, Nikki, was driving slid off the road on black ice and rolled. The pickup crossed over into the wrong lane before it struck the guard rail, which scooped it up and flipped it, making it roll over and over until it landed on its wheels at the bottom of the incline.

Mary was relatively unhurt, but her mother was bleeding and unconscious. The child unbuckled her own seatbelt, climbed out the rear window and made her way up the embankment to find help.

“The truck driver called 911, and everybody showed up,” said Nikki, now recovering from her injuries.

Crowsnest Pass RCMP Sgt. Scott Howard said Mary likely saved her mother’s life by flagging down help. He said the wreckage probably wouldn’t have been visible from the highway and it might have been a long time before they’d have been discovered.

“It was certainly a good response on her part,” Howard said. “If she’d been stuck inside the vehicle or injured or knocked out, it could have had a very different outcome. It sped up the response.

”It turns out Nikki’s boyfriend James Grayden, a tow-truck driver, was winching out another vehicle from the ditch, not 500 metres from where the wreck had just happened.

“One of the fire-and-rescue workers knows Mary really well from here in Lundbreck, and she said ‘my Dad works for Devlin’s Towing.

’”The dispatcher from the towing company alerted Grayden and he raced to the scene. Knowing it would take some time for rescue workers to cut Nikki out of the truck, he opted to go to hospital with Mary so she could be checked over. Her only marks were bruises left on each hip by her seat belt.

“She was fine and he waited there with her until they brought me in,” Nikki said. “She had told the truck driver and the ambulance workers ‘my mom’s dead, she’s not answering me.’ After I got home from the hospital, I asked her why she had climbed out of the truck and she said, ‘because I love my mom and I needed to save my mom.’”

Nikki has no memory of anything after hitting the black ice until she woke up three days later in a Calgary hospital. She’d had surgery to repair a badly-broken arm with steel plates. Her nose had to be rebuilt and one cheekbone was smashed, vertebrae in her neck are fractured and it took 200 sutures to close a gash that runs from ear to ear across her forehead.

“I always called Mary my angel, and now she’s proven it to me,” she said. “I owe my life to her and she’s a hero. My sister nominated her for a medal of bravery, and I really hope she gets it.

“I’ve told everybody that somebody was definitely looking after us — or at least looking after my daughter, and then she looked after me.”

This week, a day after Nikki returned home from hospital, she drove to the accident scene.

“I can’t believe she walked up that hill,” she said. “It’s really steep and I don’t know how she did it.

”Mary, the youngest of three children in the family, is back at kindergarten and showing no signs of trauma. She told her mom that when the truck left the road she closed her eyes tight and didn’t open them until it stopped moving.


note: Little Mary 'definately' has my vote!

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