It was the heroic intervention of a citizen who saved one of two children who drowned in the Rivière des Mille Îles on Friday evening in Laval. Another, a baby doll, is still being sought.
• Read more: A child drowned in Rivière des Mille Îles
Photo by QMI Agency, Mario Beauregard
The research teams worked hard on this Saturday in the rough river, which complicates their work.
As per the information received by us, their mother tried to take her own life by drowning with the vehicle in the rough water. Laval police would not confirm this report today.
The exact location of the tragedy, on the rue des Erables, in Laval.
A resident of the area, who did not want to be named, saw the scene on surveillance videos and explained that “the vehicle was going back and forth until it landed directly in the river.”
A Good Samaritan saved an older child who drowned after a 4-year-old girl was released from hospital this morning. As for the mother of the driver, she is still in the hospital and could not speak with investigators today.
“It doesn’t show, but the current is there. I arrived on time. The little one had water on his head. I made sure it was right,” Marc-Andre Bastian says with surprising calm the day after the tragedy.
Only then did he learn that the one-month-old baby had been abducted.
“Two Meter Wave”
The man was having dinner with his wife when he saw from his bay window a “two meter high wave” in the river in front of his house.
He rushed into the water where the boy was swept away by the current ten meters away from the submerged Honda CRV.
He still remembers the child crying, “Mommy’s under the car, breathing water.”
Photo by Thierry Laforce, QMI Agency
Mom is on the phone
His wife, still traumatized, took care of the newly rescued girl with neighbors.
“She was in shock, but very lucid. She said they were lost and her mother was on the phone,” recalled Marie-Claude Judras, who saw the piles of clothes swept up in the whirlwind and wondered if it was now a toddler.
Photo by QMI Agency, Mario Beauregard
Her husband went back into the water to pull the woman out from under the partially submerged vehicle, to no avail. He searched for her on three sides of the car with his hands.
It was the firemen who arrived a few minutes later and lifted the vehicle out of the water and rescued the woman from the front wheels.
“There were six or seven of them and they were struggling to stay in the water because of the current,” says Marc-Andre Bastian.
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