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Five-year-old lifesaver

She's only five years old, but Lexi is being hailed as a hero.

The B.C. girl helped save the lives of her mother and baby brother following a car accident in which she hiked barefoot up a steep embankment to flag down a passerby for help.

Angela Shymanski, Lexi's mom, said she, Lexi and and four-month-old Peter, were driving home to Prince George from a vacation in Alberta last month when she began to feel drowsy.

She told herself she would pull over once she reached Jasper, to get some rest, but about 15 kilometres outside of the city, her SUV left the road and went down a 12-metre embankment, crashing into a tree.

Angela was knocked unconscious and suffered a broken back and internal injuries.

Lexi woke up to her baby brother’s cries, and somehow knew she needed to get help.

The little girl managed to unclip the harness on her car seat, which was lodged up against the seat in front of her, open the smashed car’s passenger door, and climb up the rugged embankment without any shoes.

Lexi then flagged down a vehicle and told the driver what had happened.

The first passerby to stop hiked down and took baby Peter out of the vehicle, but was unable to pull Angela to safety on his own, so he went back up to the road to flag down another driver. Angela said the next person to stop was a paramedic who knew to not try to move her.

Her broken back had caused a bone fragment to lodge inside her spinal column, about half a centimetre from her spinal cord.

“If they would have jostled me a little bit, I might have been completely paralyzed,” she told Metro News. “It’s hard to know.”

After the crash, the family was taken by ambulance to a health-care centre in Jasper, and later airlifted to hospital in Edmonton. Peter was also injured, suffering a serious brain bleed. The infant was rushed into surgery and seems to be recovering, his mom said.

Angela said Lexi’s only injury appeared to be a small scratch, but she's now complaining of neck pain that appears to be the result of soft tissue injury. 

Six weeks later, Angela still has significant pain and spends most of her time resting in a hospital bed in the family living room. 

She was told the location where she crashed wasn't visible from the highway, and things could have been a lot worse if not for the heroic actions of her daughter.

Angela had also told her husband she'd be taking a different route home. So, if not for Lexi going for help, search and rescue crews may not have figured out where they were for a long time.

“It was only because she came up and flagged people down that anybody would have stopped,” said the proud mother.



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