| Alton, Ia. - Jamie Carrion strapped her two young children into the back of her stepdad's pickup truck. In the truck bed were family belongings that they were taking from Jamie's mother's place in Alton to a trailer they'd moved into the day before in Granville, in far northwest Iowa. The pickup made a diesel rumble as Jamie headed east, crossed the frozen Floyd River, glided alongside the vast windswept farm fields on Iowa Highway 10, and passed snowdrifts twice the height of her daughter, 4-year-old Averie. They were barely a mile east of Alton when Jamie's truck hit ice. Jamie could feel the truck's back end sliding. The truck rolled: once, twice, maybe three times, coming to rest on the passenger side. The windows were broken out, and the roof had caved in, trapping the family in a snowy ditch. Jamie blacked out. She came to. Nobody was on the roads: It was just after 7 p.m. last Sunday, and the whole country was watching the Super Bowl. Jamie heard her 20-month-old son, Abel, screaming in the back seat. She saw the blood on his face. She couldn't find her cell phone. She honked. Yelled. Tried to climb out the driver's side door. Got stuck. Found her phone. Dialed 911. And then she noticed: Averie wasn't crying. "Averie?" Nothing. Was her daughter unconscious? "Averie!" Nothing. Averie was gone. Jean Zenk sat at her family's kitchen table, eating barbecued ribs with her husband and three kids. On their TV in the kitchen, the Black Eyed Peas rapped and shook their way through an elaborate Super Bowl halftime show. The game didn't matter much to the Zenks. Up here near the Minnesota border, it's Vikings country, so the Zenks knew months before that their team's season was over. But it was the Super Bowl - of course they would watch. They usually go to a friend's house for the big game, but the friend wasn't having a party this year, so they watched as a family. Outside, they heard their dog, Penny, bark. And bark. And bark. A half-miniature American Eskimo, half-sheltie, Penny frequently barks at raccoons scurrying around the farmhouse. Jean's husband, Patrick, looked out the kitchen window: nothing. He just saw the grove of trees between the family's farmhouse and the old cattle yard. Penny kept barking. Jason, the oldest of the Zenk kids at 13, took a few table scraps from the plate of ribs and went to the garage. Maybe some food would quiet Penny. When Jason opened the door to the freezing cold garage, he instead heard the voice of a little girl: "Help me," she said. "Help me!" "Please, just hurry!" Jamie yelled to the dispatcher. "Will you please just hurry?" A family pulled off the side of the highway. Jamie handed Abel to them, asked them to take him, to keep him warm. An ambulance drove up, a police car, too. Averie wasn't inside the truck. Was she under the truck? In the snow? "Where is she?" Jamie repeated. "Where is she?" Police pulled out shovels and started digging. They panned flashlights all around the area. Jamie called her mom, hysterical. Jamie didn't care that the truck was totaled, didn't care that family belongings were strewn across the snow. She just wanted her daughter to be safe. She asked the deputies from the Sioux County sheriff's office where her daughter was. They didn't answer, and that is when it hit Jamie: Her 4-year-old daughter - who loves Barbies and pickles and playing house, and who is the most boisterous, confident kid in her preschool class - was dead. "There's a little girl in our garage," Jason Zenk told his parents. There's a wha- ? Jean and Patrick Zenk jumped from their kitchen table and sprinted to the garage. There, they saw a determined, soaked little girl. In between sobs, she gave them her message. "I think my mom's dead, and my brother is still in the car, and we need you to help us," the girl said. They rushed the shivering girl inside. Jean told her children this: "Pray for this little girl and her family." Jean wrapped the girl in her arms, told her children to grab blankets, held the girl at her kitchen table and talked with her. The Zenks didn't know how the little girl wound up at their house. They didn't even know her name. Only later did they, along with Jamie and the sheriff's deputies, piece things together: This little girl, 3 feet 6 inches tall and 32 pounds, had wiggled out of the broken window of the pickup truck, tunneled through some snow, climbed a fence, and trekked a quarter-mile through a snowy cattle yard, past two silos, past a grove of trees. She had walked toward a light in the distance. When she arrived at the farm that's been in the Zenk family for 98 years, Penny - the dog - met her. And the dog and the girl walked from the light post into the open garage. The next day, the Zenks reconstructed the girl's path, and they could see the dog's paw prints next to the girl's footprints in the fresh snow. But on Sunday night, they knew only that a scared little girl was shivering in their kitchen. Patrick Zenk took off in his pickup truck and headed down the snowy driveway. He turned onto Iowa 10, saw the emergency vehicles just west of his house and drove near where Jamie Carrion sat hysterical in a police car. He went up to a sheriff's deputy who was scouring the snowy fields. "I think we have what you're looking for," Zenk said. On Thursday, Jamie left her job a bit early. She works at Village Northwest Unlimited in nearby Sheldon, where she helps care for 180 adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. But on Thursday, she had a lot of stuff to take care of. Word of her story had spread. Rachael Ray's show called to have Jamie and her kids on. "The Early Show" on CBS, too. And the "Today" show wanted to fly her to New York City for this morning's show, meaning she would need to leave Sioux City in a few hours. She wasn't sure what to do. She just wanted to do what was best for the kids. Jamie called her husband, Jesus Carrion. He lives in his native Mexico now; he's been trying to get paperwork to legally immigrate to the United States for nearly two years. He didn't like the idea - just too much for Averie. Averie had been having nightmares the past few nights, had been scared of riding in vehicles, and seemed to be getting a cold. The family had spent hours in the hospital at nearby Orange City on Sunday night, with X-rays and CT scans and heated blankets. Somehow, they had only a handful of bruises among the three of them. Jamie jumped into her SUV and headed to pick up Averie from preschool. When they were at the hospital, Averie had said a couple of things to her mother: "Mom, I'm sorry for leaving you." And then: "Mom, I'm a hero." But she hadn't talked much about the accident since. Inside the preschool, Averie smiled when her mother walked in. The preschool directors talked about what a good kid Averie was: How she could make them smile even at 5:30 a.m. when her mom dropped her off, how she took breakfast orders and brought them pretend breakfasts in the morning, how she's a leader and a mother hen for all the other preschoolers. Jamie told Averie they might go to New York City to be on TV. Averie's eyes lit up. "What's New York City?" Averie said. Then she got excited: A swimming pool at the hotel, and the Statue of Liberty, and the zoo! They were going - that sealed it for Jamie. Averie wanted to, and Averie was the hero. Averie gave her mom a bracelet she'd made her that day. She put on her coat, then her backpack, and she climbed into the family's SUV. She clutched a blanket that a police officer had brought her after the crash. But before heading to the airport for the flight to the Big Apple, they had one more stop. Instead of heading for home in Granville, they drove to the Zenks' farmhouse, and they went inside. "This has gotten wild, hasn't it?" Jean Zenk said as the little girl came into her house. "It's a little bit overwhelming," Jamie said, then answered her constantly ringing cell phone. Averie was shy, then started to tell her story, in the matter-of-fact manner of a girl who turns 5 next month: "I wanted to, need to help. My mama was cold and my brother was crying and nobody knows." Jamie, Averie and Abel had to keep moving. Their plane was leaving in a few hours, and they hadn't even thought about packing. Jean Zenk waved goodbye, then sat down in the same seat where she'd swaddled Averie Carrion a few nights before. "We always hear about the bad things in the world, so it's nice to hear something with a happy ending," Zenk said. "She had a guardian angel over her that night." Additional Facts |
Friday, February 11, 2011
February 11, 2011 After crash, 4-year-old soldiers through snow to get help for mom, brother By REID FORGRAVE rforgrave@dmreg.com
