Grandmom Recounts Swamp Ordeal

F O R T  L A U D E R D A L E, Aug. 18, 2000 -- 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.

“Out of nowhere I felt that terrible jolt and my car kept turning over,” she said. “Then a tremendous drop.”

Her Toyota Tercel climbed a three-foot concrete barrier, skidded along the top and then fell straight down 40 feet, landing in some mangrove and willow trees. They cushioned the blow, and she suffered no broken bones or internal injuries, only cuts and bruises.

Up on the highway, at least two passing motorists called authorities to report that a car went off the bridge. A Fort Lauderdale Fire-Rescue Department crew searched the area, using spotlights and flashlights, but did not see her car—they were a little too far east.

While Tooter said she never saw them, she was sure somebody was trying to find her. She honked her horn and flashed her headlights. No help came.

Linda Simms, Tooter’s daughter, is angry that no one returned to recheck the bridge, particularly after her family reported that Tooter disappeared driving to the airport. I-595 was her obvious route.

“I don’t know who to be upset with—the (Florida) Highway Patrol, the fire department, whoever,” she said. “I realize that in the spot she was in she was difficult to see, but when you get all of those cell phone calls coming in, you have to keep looking.”

Tooter, though, places the blame on the other driver.

“I am hurt that anybody could do anything like that and leave,” she said. “I hope he gets what he deserves.”

No arrests have been made, but investigators are looking at the driver of a car found wrecked just east of the bridge. He claimed to have been in a one-car accident.

After Tooter’s car settled in the trees, she unhooked her seatbelt and fell into a foot-wide space.

“I was in such an awkward position my back was breaking, my bones were aching,” she said.

To attract attention, she honked and flashed the lights until her battery died. She looked for her cell phone, but it flew out during the accident. She yelled. Then she became frustrated in the100-degree heat.

“I cursed and I pleaded and I begged ... God, for my mother, for somebody to get me out of there,” she said.

As the hours passed, she kept her mind alert. She sang songs from the 1940s and 1950s—”The good songs with the named ands.”

She thought about relatives, living and dead, and her life. The former hairdresser, bookkeeper and electrologist has been widowed twice—her first husband died in World War II, leaving her with a19-month-old baby, her second of a heart attack in the early 1980s shortly before she moved to Florida.

She captured rainwater using a steering wheel cover, sopped it up with a pair of socks and then squeezed it into her mouth. Doctors say that saved her life.

She sucked two cough drops, a piece of hard candy, a button, chewed her only stick of gum—anything to keep her mouth wet. She thought of the food she would like to eat—grapes or an orange.

She tried ESP to communicate with relatives, hoping that would help find her.

The one thing she didn’t do was sleep, she said.

“I was frightened of the snakes and all of the different creatures,” she said.

But after three days, Tooter grew certain of death. Then she saw Justin stick his head over the side of the bridge. She screamed for him not to leave. He stayed and asked his dad call police. Shecalls him her hero.

“I embarrassed him,” she said of their first formal meeting Thursday at Broward General Medical Center. “I kissed him not once, twice.”

Vannelli, sitting next to her, blushed.

After paramedics rappelled off the bridge to rescue her, Tooter was overcome with joy. She asked them to call her daughter and granddaughter.

When Tooter gets out of the hospital in a few days, she plans to live life to the fullest and assist othctors are asked to bid on the removal job.