Grandmom Recounts Swamp Ordeal

F O R T  L A U D E R D A L E, Aug. 18 -- Early Tuesday morning, after surviving three days in an insect infested swamp, 83-year-old Tillie Tooter prepared to die.

She rummaged through her bloodied white purse, finding a pen and a grocery store receipt. She wrote a farewell note to her family, thought about her life and waited.

“I had made peace with myself that I was dying,” she said.

Just then, 15-year-old Justin Vannelli, working for his dad’s highway cleanup company, reached down to pick up a bumper on the side of the bridge. He noticed the trees below were mangled, likesomething heavy had fallen on them. So he looked down.

He saw Tooter’s car. She saw him.

“I screamed and I screamed,” Tooter told reporters Friday, during a press conference at Broward Medical Center where she is recovering.

“I heard him say the police are coming. ... I knew then that I had a chance to live.”

Tooter, a widowed grandmother from nearby Pembroke Pines, talked about the ordeal that left her trapped inside her car, suspended in trees just inches above the swamp’s muck and water.

“It’s a miracle that I am here, because I didn’t expect to be,” she said.

She sat in a wheelchair, her left forehead covered by a purple bruise and her body itchy from hundreds of insect bites, and told her tale of survival in a raspy Brooklyn accent.

It began about 3 a.m. Saturday when Tooter, a night owl, insisted on picking up her granddaughter, Lori Simms, and Simms’ boyfriend at Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport. Their flight from Newark, N.J., arrived 3 1/2 hours late. but Tooter had made the 15-mile drive on Interstate 595 many times, even at that hour.

“It is just as dark at 10 o’clock as it is at 3 o’clock,” she said. “I (lock) my door and I drive.”

Traveling 50 mph in the right lane and a mile west of the airport, Tooter said she never saw the car that struck her from behind.