We encounter situations in life from time to time that we did not anticipate. The key to success in life is learning to respond to and adapt to your environment.
However, at the age of 8, you rarely consider what you would do in an emergency. Fortunately, 8-year-old Mariah faced a terrifying situation but was able to demonstrate her strength…
Patricia Lynch, Mariah’s great-grandmother, arrived to pick her up after school on January 11th, just like any other day. She did something she had done numerous times before: she drove her great-granddaughter to her West Bloomfield residence.
Lynch exited her blue Chevy Equinox as they backed into the driveway while Mariah remained inside.
Things abruptly went awry. The car was moving backward. In an interview, Mariah recalled, “She thought her car was in park but it was in reverse,” Mariah said in an interview. “It started moving and she tried to stop it and she fell and the tire [went] over her foot.”
Little Mariah didn’t freak out; she acted quickly and did what she had seen her mother and other adults do when they reached a destination. “I pulled the keys out [of the ignition],” the eight-year-old recalled.
The second-grader said, “I didn’t know her foot was under there but I knew she could still get hurt because her body was under there”.
She then hurriedly exited the vehicle and ran to her mother Porchia Lane for assistance. Her mother had been at home and had had no reason to believe anything was wrong.
The family’s doorbell camera captured little Mariah’s cries for help.
“I thought it was a normal drop off and when I opened the door, I still didn’t hear her screaming initially.” She continued, “I thought, ‘Well, maybe my grandmother was having a hard time pulling up the driveway’ because it’s a little hill. As I got closer to the car, that’s when I began to hear Mariah scream and I saw my grandmother’s shoes in the middle of the driveway. I couldn’t even see her yet. So I was just in disbelief.”
When Lane went outside, she saw her grandmother lying next to the car. She noticed that her grandmother, who is 79 years old, had managed to free herself despite having her foot and leg trapped under a tire.
“Mariah was able to go grab a towel. We wrapped her leg up and caught the ambulance,” Lane recalled. “She really thought fast,” She really thought fast.
Little Mariah was traumatized by the event. But she admitted that after seeing her great-grandmother at Trinity Health Oakland Hospital, where she had been receiving treatment, she started to feel better.
By the grace of God, according to Lane, her grandmother did not break any bones, but she did require stitches and blood transfusions for the bruises, blisters, and blood loss she experienced.
Following her hospital discharge last week, Lane intends to assist her grandmother with her physical therapy and recovery.
Lane has a message for other parents regarding their children and is extremely proud of her daughter’s quick thinking. “Know that your kids are always paying attention. I really talked to Mariah and instilled in her to just follow her heart and make right decisions,” Lane said. “It just makes me proud that she just was able to think fast and she probably was more calm than me in this situation because I would have been frantic.”