A Montana teenager turned calf-roping practice into a life-saving move when a man was fighting the Yellowstone River and running out of time.
14-year-old Jory Thomas was at his grandparents’ campground in Big Timber over the Fourth of July weekend, working on rope loops, when screams pulled him toward the water.
Within moments, the teenager was no longer practicing. He was moving through the river with the same skill he had spent the past year sharpening on calves, only this time the rope was meant for a drowning man.
“Within seconds, the Montana ranch kid emptied his pockets, splashed across a side channel and waded chest-deep into the river,” Cowboy State Daily reported. “Then he did something he’d spent the past year practicing on calves. This time, he roped a drowning man.”
Jory’s father called 911, but Sweet Grass County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrived after the boy had already gotten the man safely to shore.
Sweet Grass County Sheriff Alan Ronneberg gave Jory full credit for the rescue. “My opinion, Jory saved the individual’s life, 100%,” Ronneberg said to Cowboy State Daily. “Had Jory not acted, I believe the chances of this individual not making it to shore were very slim.”
The emergency began when a boat hit a bridge and tossed three people into the water. Two made it to shore, but the third was struggling in the current until Jory reached him.
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The teenager’s focus, he later explained, never moved beyond the man in front of him.
“This current was pretty fast then, and he was moving pretty quickly,” Jory said to KTVQ. “Only thing I could focus on was helping him get out of the water because I didn’t want to see anyone go in front of me.”
Ronneberg could not say exactly how close the man came to dying, but the sheriff made clear that river emergencies can turn fatal fast.
“I’m not sure how close the individual was to being ‘lost,’ but in my experience such things happen faster than you might guess they can,” Ronneberg stated.
The Montana rescue ended with a man alive on shore. In Ohio, another river emergency ended with five adults dead after one swimmer’s trouble pulled others into the water.
The group had been along the Scioto River in the Columbus suburb of Powell on Sunday when one person went in to swim and began struggling. Delaware County Sheriff Jeffrey Balzer said the danger spread when others jumped in to help.
“That’s when the tragedy started to occur,” Balzer stated at a news conference.
The first call for help came because a frightened child from the group made it to the roadside.
“He was screaming, ‘Mama! Mama!’ and he was about to come out onto the road, and he was crying,” the passing driver said in a 911 call.
Balzer later described what the child told that driver. The child’s message was that his “family was in the river.”
Radio traffic captured the confusion of the early response, with young children on shore, adults missing in the water and responders still trying to determine how many people needed help.
“They had a 5-year-old walking out on along the road. … There’s someone in the water there,” a Delaware County dispatcher stated around 9:25 p.m. Sunday.
A language barrier with two children under 10 added to the chaos, and rescuers soon requested a Spanish-speaker.
One officer’s radio update put the scale of the emergency into grim numbers.
“Chief, it sounds like we had eight people in the water – we got five out; three confirmed missing,” the officer stated. “We are going to need a boat, we got some lighting coming down here. We’ll need some additional rescuers and suits.”
Crews found two women Sunday night and tried to save them before they were pronounced dead at a hospital.
“We got two victims in the raft at this time, we’re trying to resuscitate,” a rescuer radioed.
The search was still not over. “We got two bodies total coming out right now. We’re not exactly sure how many are left in the water. We’re still looking for at least one,” the rescuer continued.
By Monday, the remaining toll was confirmed when three men were recovered from the river, according to Delaware County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Tracy Whited.
Honduran authorities later identified four of the five adults as Honduran citizens, including Jose Mario Pineda Dias, 33, and his wife, Marina Suyapa Regalado, 28. Another married couple from Honduras also died, though their names had not been released. The fifth adult had not yet been identified.
Two children under 10 were placed in the care of family services while officials worked to notify relatives, Balzer said. The couple’s children were in Ohio’s care while arrangements were being made to reunite them with relatives in Honduras.
When Balzer was asked how the children were coping, he gave a careful answer.
“I think they’re OK, but they always say that, right?
“The great thing is, in Delaware County … we have protocols in place to take care of these folks, whether it’s peer support teams or different programs to be able to counsel them afterwards, too,” he said.
Another water emergency in Idaho came down to minutes, a tourniquet and a bystander who had one nearby.
A mother of three was tubing on Bear Lake when she was sucked into a boat’s propellers and lost both legs. Police described the boating accident as “catastrophic” and said only a “miracle” saved her life.
Dan Taylor had barely reached the lake with his family when shouting from the boat cut through the day.
“Everybody was out on the bow shouting, ‘Help, help, please help,’” Taylor said to KSL-TV. “Somebody on the boat said, ‘Get the kids out of here.’”
Taylor’s wife saw enough to know they needed something to carry the woman and something to stop the bleeding.
“She told me to get my paddleboard up to the side of the boat to use as a gurney,” Taylor said. “She just looked at me, and she just said, ‘Go get your tourniquet.’”
With both legs gone, Taylor and his family used the tourniquet on one leg and improvised with a strap on the other before medics arrived 10 to 15 minutes later.
“The victim was so courageous, and she was conscious through the whole thing,” Taylor said. “Her spirit of just staying in the moment and staying calm was nothing I ever could have conceived in a situation like that.”
