Mom of 3 Found a Week After Crashing Car

An Indiana woman who apparently fell asleep at the wheel spent six days trapped in her crashed car, its back half immersed in a creek, before her rescue on Tuesday. Johnny Martinez, a tractor operator in Newton County, had spotted what hundreds of other drivers had failed to see: a car in the ditch off a rural road in Brook. He called his supervisor, Jeremy Vanderwall, a fire chief in a neighboring town, who came to investigate. Together, the pair discovered Brieonna Cassell still inside the vehicle with dried blood on her forehead and assumed she was confused. She said she'd been trapped "since Wednesday," Vanderwall tells CBS News. "I said, 'Ma'am ... it's only Tuesday.'"

Only then did Vanderwall recall pleas for information about a 41-year-old mother of three from Wheatfield who'd been missing nearly a week. "I said, 'Oh my God ... your family's been looking for you ... I can't believe you've been here this long," he tells CBS. Cassell had driven off the road after leaving her mother's house on the evening of March 5. She "fell asleep and veered off the road and went into a very big, deep ditch" and "couldn't be seen from the road," father Delmar Caldwell tells WLS. "There are over 400 cars that were passing her a day," adds mother Kim Brown, per CBS.

Injured, trapped, and unable to move, Cassell called for help, to no avail. She spent the next six days dipping a sweater into the creek until it absorbed enough water for her to drink. Then "she would suck the water out of her shirt," Vanderwall tells CBS. "Her survival mode just was uncanny." Cassell was flown to a Chicago-area hospital, where she was placed in intensive care with severe injuries to her legs, ribs, and wrist, WLS reports, noting she could lose her lower legs. "I just can't wait to hug her and kiss her, which I probably can't do," Brown tells CBS. She adds the situation has taught her the benefit of tracking apps and devices. Without Martinez and Vanderwall, she says, her daughter might not have survived. (More rescue stories.)