Two 4-year-old twins sisters, Rosaline and Aurora Simmons, are being called heroes after the girls bravely freed themselves from the wreckage of a car crash Friday that ended their father's life, and went in search of help. The sisters from Clinton, Washington, had been driving with their dad, 47-year-old Corey Simmons, when the car went off the road and hurtled off an embankment, killing him and leaving the two girls on their own.
Both girls had been securely buckled into their booster seats, but after the crash, they managed to free themselves and escape through a broken window.
Their silver 2017 Nissan Sentra struck several trees as it barreled toward the bottom of the slope around 6 p.m. By the time the car finally came to a stop, Corey was unresponsive, according to the New York Times.
"After the crash, the twins… got themselves out of the booster seats, checked on their dad and realized Dad was in need of help," Trooper Heather Axtman of the Washington State Patrol told KOMO News. "He wasn't talking back to them — sadly he had suffered a traumatic head injury. (The twins) crawled out the back of a broken window to get back up to the roadway."
The girls crawled up the 100-foot ravine, shoeless, to the side of Bob Galberath Road, a two-lane highway on Whidbey Island, the New York Times reported. It was there that a driver passing by spotted the two sisters.
The woman who pulled over tried to find the car where the little girls' dad was, but seeing no vehicle and how scared they were, she called 911.
Cold and frightened, the girls kept saying "My daddy, my daddy," Axtman recalled. Meanwhile, the driver who found them — who has requested not to be identified by police — called authorities for help.
“Most kids have the fear of dark, and it was pitch black, and not well lit,” Axtman explained, but astonishingly, the girls were able to overcome the fears “that little kids have to commandeer themselves to help.”
Police found Corey and said he was not wearing his seatbelt when the crash happened. It's still unclear why he veered off the road.
It was later determined that Corey had suffered a fatal head injury during the wreck. The two girls were taken to Whidbey Health Medical Center, where one was treated for a bump on the head and one for a scratch on the arm. Both girls were released from the hospital Friday night.
The girls' mother, Esther Crider, directed all questions to the twins' 24-year-old half-sister Rebecah Crider, who shared that at the hospital, the girls desperately tried to explain what had happened to their dad in the accident.
“Daddy was all bloody and that they were trying to wake him up and they couldn’t,” Rebecah said.
“They are saying, ‘My daddy’s dead,’ but they don’t have a concept of death yet,” she added. “They think he is coming back.”
Meanwhile, Axtman is still in shock that the girls were able to get themselves through such a gruesome incident.
“I have been on many scenes were people were killed because of massive head trauma, and that is not a pretty scene,” she said. “I can only imagine that they saw something that nobody deserves to see.
"The bravery that they showed — I just hope that they are surrounded with the knowledge to keep that bravery and don't lose that because it [will] take you places," she told KOMO News.
"There some crashes that stick with me through my (11) years of service, and this is one that will stick with me," she said. "Just how sad and tragic, but in the same sense of how miraculous and brave those little girls are."
A GoFundMe page has been created by friends and family to help pay for Corey's funeral.
