By Michael Stavola
The Wichita Eagle
WICHITA, Kan. — Two Sedgwick County deputies and a bystander who pulled an unconscious man from a van overturned in a lake say what happened was a miracle.
Five Wichita men were injured when their 2010 Ford van left the I-235 south ramp from I-135 south and landed in a lake Tuesday evening.
All but one of the men were ejected or able to get themselves out.
The fifth was trapped underwater inside the van.
What happened next is the miracle, says Deputy Clinton Harris.
“100 percent without a shadow of a doubt this was completely divine and it was all for God’s glory,” he said.
It was around 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Harris had agreed to work past his shift. He was headed back to the station when he saw a traffic infraction and decided to pull the driver over.
Deputy Nathan Kingery was headed the other direction on I-135, saw Harris and prepared to turn around to help with the stop.
Meanwhile, Josh Hicks, a Nebraska man who works HVAC and was in town with his 17-year-old daughter for a softball tournament, saw the accident in his rearview mirror. He stopped, reversed and agreed with his daughter that she should call 911. Others kept driving, he said.
Harris followed the vehicle with the traffic infraction as it took the I-135 south to I-235 south ramp. Then, his eyes were drawn to Hicks and his daughter, who were getting out of their truck.
He then looked down to the lake just off the highway and saw the overturned van.
Hicks was already running down to the lake.
Harris called off his traffic stop and alerted that he needed fire and EMS for a submerged vehicle. He ran down to the van.
Kingery, a minute behind him, heard the call change.
The passengers who had escaped the van told Harris one person was still inside.
Harris had learned water rescue techniques in the U.S. Navy but was about to use them for the first time in a real-life situation.
The thick mud made it hard to move. Harris treaded through and even fell in the water as he moved around the van.
Body cam video shows Harris and Hicks moving through roughly waist-high water as the van’s horn continued to blare.
Harris tried to go to the front of the van but realized, with the depth of the water, mud and additional weight he carried, he could drown.
Harris went to the back of the van. The back window was smashed out. There was a gap to see inside. He guessed the cabin was about 80% full of water.
He didn’t see anyone.
Kingery arrived shortly after Harris did.
Kingery saw three passengers who appeared OK and a fourth laying face down, who Kingery thinks was ejected from the vehicle. Another passenger was with the one on the ground. Kingery saw movement but called out a code blue, meaning unresponsive, as he ran into the water to help.
Harris said he moved to the passenger side of the vehicle and used a window break tool to bust out a window. He felt inside but didn’t touch anyone.
Harris moved to the next window and did the same thing, then again a third time.
Video shows Harris propped his torso on the sill of the broken glass as he tried to reach further down into the van.
Hicks said he yelled to the other passengers, asking where the man had been sitting. One of them responded. Hicks then went back to a window Harris had already busted and that they had both already checked.
Harris was getting ready to break the front passenger window when Hicks told Harris that he thought he had the man.
“I’m pretty tall so I got some pretty long arms and I was giving everything I had to get down as far as I could in there and grab ahold of anything I could get my arms on,” Hicks said, adding he reached in a few times before he got the man. “It was pure luck, pure luck I grabbed at the right spot.”
He added that it was by the “grace of God he happened to still be in that seat.”
Body cam video tells the next part of the story:
“Right here, right here, right here,” Hicks told Harris as he pulled the man up and got his head above water.
“You got him, you got him,” Harris yelled back, warning Hicks to be careful of cutting the man on the glass while the two pulled him from the van.
“Kingery, we got him,” Harris yelled.
Kingery was on the other side of the van, searching as well.
“It seemed like forever but after a couple minutes the victim was able to be pulled out of the vehicle,” Kingery said in a phone interview later.
The three helped get the man to shore. Based on the size of the man, Harris said, not one or two of them could have done it.
“The guy that was there, myself and Kingery, it was purposeful,” he said. “I think it was 100 percent divine appointment.”
They got him to the bank and began CPR. Harris went first. Kingery stepped in when Harris fatigued. They were able to get the man breathing before EMS arrived.
Everyone helped to get the man on a stretcher and up the steep hill. He was rushed to the hospital.
As the scene cleared, Harris noticed he had blood all over his arms.
He needed 14 stitches on a finger on his left hand, left wrist and right hand. He also had other cuts that were cleaned and glued.
The cuts happened while he was reaching in through the broken glass.
The man who had been submerged in the van was listed in critical but stable condition at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis intensive care unit around 1 p.m. Thursday. Of the other four passengers, one did not appear in the hospital’s system, two have been dismissed and one was stable.
All but the man in critical condition are in their early 20s. He is in his 40s.
Hicks said the daughter of the man critically injured reached out to him on Facebook on Thursday afternoon and said her father was recovering quickly.
“I’m just glad he is alive and breathing,” Hicks said. “I have been pretty shook up wondering if we got to him fast enough.”
Hicks said he had some scrapes and bruises from the rescue, but there was never any hesitation about whether he should jump in to help.
“Somebody needs help, you gotta help em,” he said.
Harris, who joined the department January 2021, said he felt a calling to get into law enforcement. He said there have been dozens of times when something lined up so perfectly, he calls it divine.
“That guy whenever he does wake up, which I believe he will, he’s a living testimony of the timing of God,” he said. “And if he doesn’t have a relationship with Jesus before this happened, I pray that this is the thing he needed in his life to allow that to be the outcome for him.”
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