The Oregon baby who miraculously survived a downed power line that electrocuted his parents and uncle to death was rescued by a selfless 18-year-old who crouched down to grab the child from his mortally injured father’s chest.
Majiah Washington jumped into action Wednesday when she saw a flash outside her Portland home after a red SUV became entangled with a power line taken out by a fallen tree branch.
The child’s parents had been putting their 9-month-old baby in his car seat when the tragic bedlam started.
The mother screamed at her boyfriend to grab the child and get away as a fire started under the car.
But a thick sheet of ice from a powerful winter storm caused the father, identified as Nash, to slip with the baby in his arms and touch the livewire, Washington said. Then the child’s mother, who was six months pregnant, and then her 15-year-old brother were killed the same way.
Washington was on the phone with first responders as the trio lay on the ground when she saw the baby’s head move.
“It was all happening so fast,” she said during a press conference Thursday streamed by KOIN.
She decided to make the daring rescue herself instead of waiting for emergency personnel. The teen said she crouched down and used her hands to break any fall as she inched toward the child in danger.
Washington, a daycare worker, quickly grabbed the baby and brought him back to safety. Even though Washington said she made contact with the father’s chest, she wasn’t zapped.
“I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh I could be electrocuted,’” she said. “I was more so thinking ‘I have to grab this baby’.”
Portland Fire and Rescue spokesperson Rick Graves called Washington brave but admitted he didn’t understand how she and the baby weren’t electrocuted.
He said the baby survived, in part, “because of the heroic acts of a member of our community.” He is healthy, the official added.
“I just thought I have a nephew myself, I have little brothers,” Washington explained. “I would want somebody to do the same thing.”
Washington’s neighbor Ronald Briggs, told television station KGW that the baby’s mother, his 21-year-old daughter, came over to his house to use the internet after hers went out.
He watched the couple slide to their deaths and screamed at his 15-year-old son, Ta-Ron Brigg, to stay away, but he too slid and was fatally shocked.
“I have six kids. I lost two of them in one day,” Briggs said.
Snow, freezing rain, ice, and bitterly cold temperatures in the Pacific Northwest have led to at least 10 deaths in Oregon in recent days.
