Five University of Georgia sorority sisters are being hailed heroes after saving a mother and her two children from their sinking car. Molly McCollum, Jane McArdle, Eleanor Cart, Clarke Jones, and Kaitlyn Iannace were leaving their Athens campus to go celebrate St. Patrick's Day weekend in Savannah, Georgia on March 15, 2024.
During their drive, they took a detour to stop for lunch, which then made them reroute through a rural area when they got back on the road. Not too long after, they came across the scene of a car crash.
"In our peripheral vision, we just see this … spark of white, a little cloud of dust and kind of like a big old crash," Molly told Good Morning America. "And I'm just like, 'Am I imagining that?' And Clarke was like, 'Yeah, yeah, let's go check that out.'" Clarke added, "That's when we decided to pull over, and that's when we saw the car in the water."
Cori Craft and her two sons were sitting in the car. The driver had lost control of her SUV, causing her to veer off the road and into a creek. "I was thinking, I'm like, 'I don't even know where my phone is. I don't have my glasses. I don't know how I'm going to call for help,'" the mother said. "And then I just heard them over on the bank, and they shouted [asking] if I was OK. And I'm like, 'No, my kids are in the car.'"
The sisters jumped into action, calling 911 and then going into the water to help the family. Cori had crawled out through the broken sunroof and the sisters managed to help her open the door. They got the older son out quickly, but the 4-year-old was still trapped underwater and buckled into his car seat. Eventually, they pulled him out safely.
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"We all together just pulled him out of the vehicle and then, yeah, [he] was fully unconscious and it was terrifying," Molly said. Kaitlyn added that the child's "lips [were] completely blue, his eyes were closed. He was not breathing." Clarke, a former lifeguard, started performing CPR on the little boy. He eventually started breathing again. "And at that point, like, all of us were crying," Molly said. "And it was like, 'No way that just happened.'"
