A North Texas man credited for potentially saving a driver’s life said he doesn’t consider himself a hero, but instead calls the entire situation a ‘miracle.’
When Gene Rains, of Whitney, drives along a busy highway he typically never pulls over. This past Tuesday was a different story when he was driving his wife and grandkids to visit his daughter and her family in White Settlement.
“We passed Benbrook, that exit for 377. My grandson, by the way, he’s three. He’s been asleep this whole time,” Rains told NBC 5. “At the last second … I mean, literally … he wakes up and says, 'I have to go to the bathroom.' He said ‘pee.’ Three-year-old says, ‘pee,’ right?”
Rains said while he was only about 10 minutes from his daughter’s house, he pulled over near the exit for Team Ranch Road and helped his grandson.
“Suddenly, I noticed the ground kind of dropped off beneath us a little bit and as I looked, I could see it was kind of like a culvert. There’s not a guardrail. You can’t see it from the road. It’s impossible to see,” he said. “Once he was done, I picked him up and I was about to turn and I looked straight ahead. I didn’t really understand what I was seeing. There was a car, a black Honda buried in the embankment on the other side.”
Once he put his grandson back in the truck, Rains took a closer look for himself. That’s when he saw the buried car with a crushed top.
“Suddenly, I saw an arm. There’s an arm in the driver’s side window, laying in the window sill,” he said.
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He called 911, describing what he saw. However, Rains said something was “gnawing” at him throughout that early evening. He and his son-in-law returned to the scene.
“The arm outside the car has moved. Instead of laying flat, it’s sticking up as if someone had their arm behind their head,” he recalled.
They called 911 again once returning to the home to give more information to the police and even asked an officer with the Fort Worth Police Department who happened to live in his daughter’s neighborhood. Eventually, Rains was able to guide police back to the original scene.
Officer Brad Perez with the Fort Worth Police Department confirmed to NBC 5, units were dispatched that early evening to 6047 West Loop 820 South Freeway.
The single-vehicle crash “occurred sometime in the past few days but had not been located since it is not visible from the road,” an email from Officer Perez stated.
A male passenger was found dead, while the male driver was extracted by the Fort Worth Fire Department and transported to an area hospital.
Rains told NBC 5, he doesn’t feel like a hero. Instead, he just said he was “persistent.”
“He [officer] came and talked to me at the house, came and shook my hands and told me I saved this man’s life. There was no way they would have found him,” Rains recalled. “Looking back at it now, I didn’t hear a voice. It had to be a God. It had to be God directing me to stop to find this and get this person help.”
No information has been released regarding the identities of the two men found in the car.
“I hope he’s [driver] OK. My goal is to meet him, to shake his hand, to hug him,” Rains said. “Just to let him know there was a force that was working for both of us that drew us together and that somehow we both learn something from it.”
