Woman found alive 5 days after crash
LENOIR, N. C. — Tommy Courtner had searched for Amber Pennell with hundreds of others for five days.
They had combed miles of winding roads in Caldwell County where they believed the 21-year-old mother of two had wrecked her pickup truck on her way home from work. Many worried they would never find her — much less alive.
On Monday night, just before rescuers were ready to give up for the day, Courtner said he was walking along U. S. 321 and was drawn to a swath of moist kudzu behind an 18 foot-embankment.
There he saw tire tracks and followed them to the edge of a 100-foot ravine. Seeing nothing at first, he turned to leave.
Then he spotted the tip of a chrome fender shining from the bottom of the hole.
Feeling a surge of adrenalin, he called for Pennell.
“Amber,” he shouted, “can you hear me?”
Moments later, bloodied, drenched from rain and still pinned beneath the pickup’s dashboard, Amber turned her head.
Courtner’s heart felt like it stopped, he said.
He and crews carved a path through the kudzu to climb down to the crushed Toyota Tacoma pickup.
Lucid, but weak, Pennell begged them for something to eat and drink as paramedics filled her veins with fluids.
Rescuers pried open the truck, then used ropes and a stretcher to pull Pennell up the ravine. A helicopter airlifted her in critical condition to Carolinas Medical Center.
Most people, especially someone with Pennell’s injuries, couldn’t survive more than a few days without food or water, Courtner said.
The only reason she survived, he said, is because “she had the will.”
She whispered as much to her husband from her hospital bed.
“She told me she wasn’t going to die and leave her children,” said Mitchell Pennell. “And she said she knew I would be looking until I found her.”
Surgeons on Tuesday were able to put a rod in Pennell’s broken leg and told her family that, despite a broken arm, fractured skull and other injuries, she would likely be OK.
“If you don’t believe in miracles, you should,” Caldwell County Detective BJ Fore said. “I can attest to one now.”
Amber Pennell left work at a barbecue restaurant in Lenoir at about 10 p. m. last Wednesday and called her husband to say she was on her way home. She never arrived.
Tuesday night, Amber Pennell was asking for her children, but doesn’t remember the accident.
“She’s so strong,” her husband said. “Last night she told me, because of her two babies, she wasn’t going to die on them.”
The children are a daughter, Gracelyn, who turns 3 today, and a son, Cameron, 1.
