Passers-by aid Volusia rescue
Published: June 13, 2005
One minute, Shawn Komiskis was riding in the front seat of his father’s pickup Sunday, on the way to a cousin’s birthday party.
The next he was in a rain-swollen ditch, struggling to save the life of a 10-year-old boy pinned in an overturned pickup.
“I knew the worst thing that could happen was the truck could explode. Gas was everywhere. You could hardly breathe,” said Shawn, 17, of Port Orange. “But I wasn’t scared for me, I was scared for them.”
Shawn and his family arrived minutes after an accident sent two trucks into the ditch along County Road 415, a two-lane road that cuts across a rural area west of New Smyrna Beach.
One of the trucks, a red 2001 Ford pickup, was upside down in 4 feet of water, the roof crumpled and the driver’s side badly smashed.
As Shawn’s dad pulled over, the teenager could hear calls for help from a woman and a boy trapped inside. He tore off his shoes and ran to the pickup.
“I heard her screaming, and I saw the boy. I just jumped in,” Shawn said, standing barefoot by the roadside, his white tank top and shorts still damp from his rescue. “I said, ‘Somebody’s in trouble and I’ll do anything I can to help.’ ”
Wilhelmine Leissler, 42, of Samsula, was inside in the driver’s seat, her head barely above water, calling for help. Her son Michael was in the back seat, his arm pinned between the seat and the window.
Shawn, a senior at Atlantic High School in Port Orange, held the boy’s head above water in his arms and consoled him until emergency responders arrived.
“He only cried a couple of times, because he got scared,” Shawn said. “He was saying, ‘Don’t let me die.’ ”
As Shawn asked the fourth-grader at Samsula Middle School his age and his school, Shawn’s father, two cousins, an aunt and an uncle helped pull the boy’s mother from the pickup.
Though Leissler had been screaming when they arrived, by the time they managed to free her, she had choked on so much of the muddy, fuel-soaked water that she was unconscious and her stomach was ballooned with water. She wasn’t breathing and had no pulse.
The family and others revived her by administering CPR until rescue workers arrived at the site, just south of Pioneer Trail Road, said Mark O’Keefe, EVAC Ambulance spokesman.
Their work, along with help from a motorcyclist and others who stopped, may have saved Leissler, who, O’Keefe said, was airlifted to Halifax Medical Center in critical condition with life-threatening injuries.
“If not for their actions, this woman would have died,” O’Keefe said. “There were literally 15 good Samaritans on-scene.”
Without Shawn’s actions, Michael could have drowned, said Volusia County Fire Services Cmdr. Barry G. Ellis. Nearly 20 emergency workers responded to the two-vehicle accident that occurred about 1:20 p.m. A firefighter also was injured in the rescue.
Shawn, Ellis said, “deserves a medal. The kid would have drowned. He wouldn’t have made it.”
The accident occurred as Meryl Hanson, 70, of Splendora, Texas, was driving north on County Road 415 in her 1998 Dodge turbo-diesel truck, hauling a 30-foot camper-trailer. Her husband, Louis Hanson, 83, was asleep in the back of the extended cab.
Leissler also was driving north, headed to her home on Lakeshore Drive. Hanson was behind her.
As Leissler slowed to turn across the southbound lane onto the dirt road, Hanson tried to stop, Fisher said. But she couldn’t slow quickly enough and pulled left into the southbound lane, plowing into the left rear driver’s side of Leissler’s vehicle, rolling it at least twice before it came to rest in the ditch on the west side of the roadway.
Hanson’s truck continued another 100 feet before crashing into the ditch, also on the west side of the road.
The Hansons were taken by ambulance to Halifax Medical Center. Meryl Hanson was transported in stable condition, O’Keefe said, while Louis Hanson was in serious condition.
Leissler was airlifted to Halifax Medical Center. Sunday night she was listed in critical condition.
Michael Leissler also was airlifted to Halifax after rescuers lifted the pickup from the ditch and cut the camper shell away, freeing the boy. He was treated and released.
“It was just heartbreaking, but they finally got him out,” said Jane Carton, a neighbor of the Leisslers’. She and her husband, Robert, had been out in their yard when they heard the crash.
Jordan Reimer, 13, a neighbor and friend of Michael’s, sustained minor injuries in the crash but managed to get out of the pickup and run down the dirt road for help before the Komiskis family arrived. Jordan’s family took him to the hospital.
The Cartons called Shawn and his family heroes for their actions.
J.J. Genovese, 16, of South Daytona, a cousin of Shawn’s who helped give CPR to Leissler, said he and his cousin were just doing what they would want anyone else do for them.
“I was just trying to get them out,” he said. “Just glad to help.”
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