Australians have opened their hearts to three young children left orphaned after their parents were killed in a horrific car accident on a remote Outback road as the tragic reason for the ill-fated journey is revealed.
The three children, a five-year-old girl and her two-and-one-year-old siblings, were trapped in a car with their dead parents for 55 hours after the vehicle veered off a remote Western Australian road and overturned in the early hours of Monday. Christmas day.
Tragically, when the Land Rover Discovery was located on Tuesday, driver Jake Day, 28, and his partner Cindy Braddock, 25, were found dead in the overturned vehicle on the Corrigin-Kondinin road, 258km west of Perth.
A GoFundMe The page has already raised nearly $70,000 despite only being created two days ago, with the money helping pay for the couple’s funerals and future expenses for the three orphaned children.
It is revealed that the family was making the 200 km trip back to Kondinin to spend Christmas with Mr. Day’s mother.
Australians have poured their hearts out to the three children of Jake Day (pictured left) and Cindy Braddock (pictured right) with more than $70,000 raised to help the three orphans after a fatal car accident kill the two adults.
The fundraiser’s creator, Casey Guyer, wrote a message of thanks for the tremendous response to the page.
Thank you all for the donations. This will make a huge difference in the lives of the children,” the update said.
“Everyone is well and surrounded by family.”
The children are believed to have been free of serious injury after arriving at Perth Children’s Hospital dehydrated after waiting in over 30C heat to be rescued.
Another fundraiser organized by Cindy’s older sister, Helen Braddock, has raised more than $3,000, which she said would go towards funerals and children’s futures.
“My heart breaks for these two beautiful people taken too soon,” Helen wrote.
The children were airlifted to hospital after a close family friend found the crashed vehicle just 10km from their destination, the Wheatbelt town of Kondinin in WA.
The five-year-old was hailed a hero after she unbuckled her one-year-old brother and released him from his seat.
The family set out at 1am on Christmas Day with the plan to arrive early at Mr Day’s mother’s house after making the 200km journey from the town of Northam.
Nathan O’Donnell, who works at a Northam gas station, told the Western Australia he saw the couple arrive at 1:11 a.m. on Christmas Day.
According to him, the couple already looked ‘exhausted’.
“They went out, fueled up, then went in, went to the bathroom, came over and got drinks, snacks and stuff for the road,” O’Donnell said.
‘They looked very exhausted.
He told me that he was going to Kondinin and that it was a couple of hours away by car.
He didn’t buy a coffee. Then he left, I said good luck with the long journey.
‘Unfortunately, he never made it.’
The family had left Northam, WA, around 1am on Sunday and were on their way to their home in Kondinin, some 200km away.
Mr. Day’s cousin, Michael Read, said Jake might have been too tired to drive when he decided to move on to Kondinin.
In the midst of the tragedy, the oldest boy, only five years old, has become a hero.
He saved his one-year-old brother’s life by unbuckling the car seat.
WA Health told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday that the children are being treated by medical and psychological specialists.
‘The three children are in a stable condition. Emotional and psychological support is being provided to them,’ a spokesman said.
Mike Atkinson, a former military survival instructor, told Daily Mail Australia how lucky the boys were to make it out of the wreck.
He said heat stroke could have killed the children if they had been forced to wait much longer for rescuers to reach them.
Severe dehydration can cause the tongue to swell, making it increasingly difficult to breathe.
The three children, aged five, two and one, were pulled from the family’s overturned Land Rover Discovery on Tuesday afternoon, two and a half days after the accident.
Atkinson said that in hot conditions, three days without water for 72 hours is the limit for most ordinary people.
Fortunately, the children were found after almost 60 hours.
“Obviously, it’s the kind of situation that could go either way, so assuming the kids didn’t have major injuries, their main risks would have been heat injuries.”
Your body’s thermostatic regulation could have kept you in a safe zone through sweating, but that sweating resource is finite. You can’t keep that forever.
“The body needs to sweat to maintain a safe temperature, but eventually, our bodies run out of water to sweat with.”
He said that the fact that the car windows were broken helped the children.
If the car had been in full sun with the windows intact, it would be difficult to survive. A car in sunlight with the windows up can reach 60 degrees in a matter of minutes.
He comes as one of Australia’s best kids. Psychologists warned that children will need a lot of support in the coming years.
Cindy Braddock, 25, and Jake Day, 28, were killed when their Land Rover Discovery left a remote WA road and overturned
One of Australia’s top child psychologists warned that children being trapped for so long had the potential to have “serious” impacts in later years. In the photo, Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg
“The death of a parent in infancy is a traumatic experience,” said Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg.
“A child’s individual personality and the amount of time they were exposed to the event can influence their response,” said Dr. Carr-Gregg.
“Severe reactions are related to the suddenness of the event and the degree to which the child was rendered powerless during the trauma.
“Other factors, such as the duration of trauma exposure and whether the ventilation was experienced in isolation, with other people, can play a significant role in how a child responds.”
But she said that with a strong support system, children will process the loss and thrive.
