Teresa Bowers and Sharon Torres both knew something wasn’t right.
At 11:30 p.m. on June 24, Teresa was startled out of bed from a deep slumber. At the same time several miles away, Sharon woke up with a strange feeling in her stomach.
Twenty minutes later, both mothers would receive a call that the vehicle their children were traveling in had hit the Airline Drive median and flipped into the canal near St. Rose Avenue.
“It was mothers’ intuition,” Sharon said.
The driver of the Chevrolet Trailblazer, 17-year-old Jorge Garcia-Soria of St. Rose, was bringing 16-year-old Alyssia Torres back to her Montz home. Riding in the back seat of the vehicle was 17-year-old St. Rose resident Ryan Bowers.
All three say they were wearing their seat belts.
“I was going the speed limit, but I hit the median and panicked,” Garcia-Soria said. “I hit the brakes and the vehicle blew a tire and flipped twice.
“Then we landed upright in the canal.”
Torres said that she kept her eyes closed from the time the tire blew until the vehicle hit the water. However, when she opened them up and saw where they were, she immediately lowered the automatic windows. Luckily, the power switch still worked.
“We hadn’t started to sink yet and the water was right up to the window,” she said. “When I lowered it, water started pouring into the car. I climbed through and got in the water.
“It was just instinct.”
Garcia-Soria first tried to get out by forcing open the driver’s side door. When it wouldn’t budge, he took his seat belt off and followed his friend out the passenger side window.
“I was happy to be out of the car, but then I realized how many things live in the water,” Garcia-Soria said. “Alyssia and I just started to swim straight ahead because it was so dark we couldn’t see anything.
“Thankfully, the passenger side window was pointing straight to the road, so we were swimming in the right direction.”
While all this was going on, Bowers was standing on top of the Trailblazer. Though he doesn’t remember exactly how he got out of the vehicle, he assumes he went out the back window, since it had shattered during the crash.
“It didn’t feel real,” he said. “Everything happened so fast. I remember feeling water, and then the next thing I knew I was standing on top of the Trailblazer.”
Though he was standing on top of the vehicle, Bowers wasn’t able to see much. Instead, he began yelling for his friends to get out of the vehicle. When he heard splashing and voices in the water, he said that he jumped in and followed the sounds to safety.
“When I got on the road I looked down and my arm was covered in blood because I had so many cuts,” Bowers said.
Though Torres was calm during the wreck and evacuation from the submerged vehicle, when she got on the road her emotions changed.
“I was freaking out,” she said. “I was screaming at passing cars so that we could get help.”
Garcia-Soria said that at least 15 vehicles passed by without stopping.
“We were all covered in mud and Ryan was getting in the middle of the lane to flag down cars,” he said. “No one stopped and we had decided to start walking to Ormond Boulevard to use the phone at McDonalds.”
Before the three began that trek though, an 18-wheeler stopped and called the police.
“Right before the 18-wheeler stopped we all watched the Trailblazer sink,” Torres said. “The lights had come on during the wreck and you could see the car falling deeper and deeper into the water.”
Twenty minutes later, the authorities had blocked off the area, let the three use phones to call their parents and had begun the search for the vehicle.
To this day, the Trailblazer remains submerged somewhere in the murky depths of the canal after authorities failed to locate it.
“One of the policemen shined his light at where the Trailblazer used to be and there were four or five alligators swimming there,” Garcia-Soria said. “We know we were lucky that we were able to make it to land, especially since he told me that parts of the canal are like 50 feet deep.”
And that’s exactly what the mothers told the group when they arrived on the scene.
“I ran right up and gave all three of them a hug,” Sharon said. “I asked them if they knew how lucky they were to have gotten out.”
Teresa said that all three teens seemed to be in shock when she arrived.
“I hugged each one of them because I was so happy they had made it out,” she said. “A lot of times people don’t.”
As for Torres, Garcia-Soria and Bowers, they plan on staying away from Airline when possible.
“I don’t want to drive down there again,” Garcia-Soria said.
Torres echoed those sentiments.
“If it’s during the daytime, I will probably be OK,” She said. “But I know I will be scared to drive or ride down there at night.”
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