How 83-year-old Tillie Tooter survived 3 days trapped in her car. It involved a button

Tillie Tooter was on her way to pick up her granddaughter from Fort Lauderdale Airport. She never made it.

The 83-year-old grandma disappeared during her trip in August 2000. A missing-person bulletin went out.

Where was Tillie Tooter?

Three days later, we learned of one of the most improbable tales of survival.

Tooter’s car was run off the road. She was trapped, but survived in the 90s South Florida heat on rainwater, a cough drop — and determination.

She was discovered by a passerby and rescued by the experts.

A year and a half later, Tooter ended up face to face with the suspect who ran her off Interstate 595 and into a mangrove swamp below during her trip from Pembroke Pines to the airport.

Tooter died in August 2015 at age 98, 15 years after her miraculous rescue and recovery.

Here is her story told through the archives of the Miami Herald.

STORY OF SURVIVAL

Published Aug. 16, 2000

As she lay in her mangled car, far beneath the freeway where she had plunged over the guardrail early Saturday morning, Tillie Tooter screamed for help.

For the next three days, the 83-year-old retiree struggled to survive as the temperatures soared to above 90 degrees. She sipped feebly at rainwater caught in a steering-wheel cover while ants and mosquitoes stung her.

Tooter’s ordeal ended Tuesday morning when a passerby on the highway spotted her car half-buried in the foliage below. Alive but weak, she was rushed to Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, where she was upgraded from critical to serious condition late Tuesday.

Doctors say her outlook is good.

“She didn’t think she was ever going to see us again,” said a relieved Lori Simms, Tooter’s granddaughter. “She just wanted hugs and kisses — and water.”

The elderly woman suffered cuts, scrapes and bruises in the crash, but no broken bones, doctors said. She was covered with blisters and insect bites.

Authorities suspect a heavy vehicle - possibly a truck or tractor-trailer - slammed into the back of Tooter’s Toyota Tercel while driving east on Interstate 595 about a mile east of U.S. 441. The impact caused Tooter’s car to slide along the concrete barrier wall for roughly 35 feet before catapulting over into the mangrove swamp below, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

The second driver apparently never stopped.

Discovery of the missing Pembroke Pines grandmother brought joy to her family and friends after several days filled with anxiety.

Tooter had pulled out of her Century Village retirement community just before 3 a.m. Saturday. She was on her way to pick up her visiting granddaughter and her granddaughter’s boyfriend at Fort Lauderdale International Airport after their flight from New Jersey arrived several hours late.

“We called her and told her we’d take a cab,” Simms said. “But she said, ‘Don’t be silly, you know I’m up. I’ll come and get you.’ That’s the kind of person she is.”

Tooter never arrived. After waiting and pacing, Simms and her boyfriend eventually called police and reported Tooter missing.

Over the weekend, sheriff’s divers searched area canals and waterways. Helicopters hunted by air.

Troopers combed portions of fence line along what they figured was her route to the airport on Interstate 75, according to Pembroke Pines Police. A detective even drove to Vero Beach to check out a reported sighting of Tooter.

They never found her.

Then, shortly after 9 a.m. on Tuesday, 15-year-old Justin Vannelli was picking up litter with his father, whose company has the county’s highway cleanup contract.

As he walked along the outside edge of eastbound I-595, he happened to glance down into the trees below.

“I saw all those trees pushed over,” Vannelli, of Delray Beach, recalled. “And then I saw the car. I was looking at it for a while, and I saw her feet. She was dangling her feet to get my attention.”

Vannelli shouted to his father, who called 911. Minutes later, rescue workers arrived. They rappelled roughly 50 feet down into the muck.

As they approached the car, they heard Tooter call in a feeble voice, “Can you guys get me out of here?”

“We’re gonna try,” Fort Lauderdale Fire-Rescue Lt. Michael Hicks called back. “That’s what we’re here for.”

A team of more than 25 rescue workers sawed down surrounding trees. They chopped off the car’s roof.

They then carefully extracted Tooter - who lay with her feet under the dashboard and her upper body in the back seat - from the mangled wreckage, loaded her into a basket and hauled her up onto the freeway by crane.

Her survival defied the odds - and the increasingly grim expectations of those following her disappearance.

“It’s absolutely amazing,” Division Chief Stephen McInerny said. “This is probably the most difficult rescue we’ve had to do as a department.”

The thick canopy of willow and other trees that almost hid Tooter’s car, cushioned it when it hit bottom, McInerny said. That, and the fact that she was wearing her seat belt, helped her avoid more serious injuries.

Tooter told her granddaughter the car flipped three times after it went over the bridge. After coming to rest, the woman said she was hanging from her seat belt, which she then unfastened. She said she was reaching for her phone when she was hit. When the car landed, she said the phone was lost, Simms said.

The swampy muck is swarming with bugs, snakes and alligators, fire officials said. It’s muggy and airless, they said, and heats to over 100 degrees under the noon sun.

Tooter feared she wouldn’t make it, relatives said. When her screams went unheard in the rush of traffic passing she scrawled a note to her family.

She didn’t want her granddaughter to feel guilty, relatives said.

After Tooter was rescued, those same relatives gushed with relief. They laughed about Tooter’s final words to paramedics as they prepared to lift her from her car.

“Can you bring my pocketbook?” she requested in a weak voice.

Shortly after noon, as Tooter was transferred to the intensive care unit, a trooper granted her wish: He arrived at the hospital carrying her stained white purse.

HOW SHE WAS DISCOVERED

Published Aug. 19, 2000

Alone and bloody in her battered car, surrounded by swamp and insects stinging her, Tillie Tooter struggled to focus her mind.

Being angry helped, Tooter told the press Friday at Broward General Medical Center.

Rage, guilt, anxiety, frustration and fear worked her into a controlled fury. For many hours as she lay trapped in the black of night she tried telepathy, projecting her thoughts across the continent to her sister in California.

“I kept thinking. I tried concentrating,” she says. “Here I am,” she tells her sister. “I’m under the freeway. 595. 595. 595.”

But the angel who answered the 83-year-old Century Village resident’s prayers was not her sister, Tooter said. It was not the police, or her relatives and friends frantically scouring highways and airport parking lots for her.

Help came in the form of a shy, 15-year-old named Justin Vannelli who, on the third day of her entombment, was picking up trash along the interstate.

Justin, who joined Tooter on Friday at Broward General, noticed the jungle of trees was strangely parted alongside the concrete wall about a mile west of Interstate 95. When he glanced down, he saw the side of Tooter’s silver Toyota glinting among the leaves 35 feet below.

“Don’t go away,” Tooter pleaded in a voice weak with exhaustion and thirst. “Don’t go away.”

She saw the kid’s tanned, handsome face peering at her in the din of morning traffic. “He couldn’t hear me.” She stuck a leg through a broken window. Then, she heard him shouting to her. “He was my prayer, my hero,” she said, gripping the youth’s arm.

In a week of news dominated by the Democratic National Convention and the Russian submarine tragedy, the tale of Tillie Tooter could have been a footnote.

But as details of the red-haired Brooklyn native’s resourcefulness and aplomb became clearer, her story captured the admiration of many Americans from the host of total strangers who sent her flowers and cards, to hosts of national TV news programs.

Friday was the first day Tooter met the public and gave her account of how she spent three days entombed in her car, in sweltering 90-plus degree heat. She had been in Broward General’s Intensive Care Unit since rescue workers brought her to safety shortly after 9 a.m. Tuesday.

“Be gentle, guys. She’s a little overwhelmed,” her granddaughter, Lori Simms, told the media before Tooter made her entrance in a wheelchair. But Simms’ feisty grandma appeared to thrive on all the attention, expressing discomfort more with the huge black and blue bruise on the left side of her face and with the maze of inflamed insect bites on her arms, than with probing questions from reporters.

As Tooter quickly won over the press, Simms relaxed. She stared at her grandmother lovingly, rocking back and forth with giggles as Tooter wise-cracked, and then tearfully as Tooter said that she had given up hope and made her peace with God just minutes before Justin materialized. When it was over, many reporters and camera operators applauded.

Tooter said her ordeal began just after 3 a.m. on Saturday. She was driving at 50 mph, she said, “because I had time to kill” en route to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport to pick up Lori whose flight had been delayed.

“I was sailing along and out of nowhere there was this terrible jolt,” she said. “Then there was this tremendous drop. Then I had to release the seat belt because I was lying on my side and the space was narrow and I’m not that thin.”

After Tooter’s car settled in the trees, she fell into a foot-wide space between the door and seat.

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

Her first thought, she said, was anger at whoever had knocked her off the highway. “I am very angry - very angry and hurt that anybody could do something like that and just leave,” she said.

Then, after several hours in which she neither saw nor heard the Fire-Rescue crew who came near the scene soon after, shone their searchlights down into the brush, and left after 15 minutes, she realized she might be there for a while.

She settled down to the job of survival.

“I have a certain amount of strength,” she said. “When I need it, I use it.

“I came from a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn. I grew up able to take care of myself. When you get to be 83 you know a few things.”

So the next day when it rained, Tooter pulled out one of the two metallic steering wheel covers she had in the car and captured some drops of water. She used a golfing sock to sponge up the liquid and sucked it to get moisture. Now and then she popped a button in her mouth and sucked on that to produce saliva.

She helped sustain herself on a cough drop which she licked, put away, and licked again and again. She nibbled on a piece of gum.

She used her foot to jab at the horn, hoping that someone would hear. She searched for her cellphone but realized it had been ejected from the car when it somersaulted. To pass the time and to lift her spirits she sang the refrains of big band hits she danced to in her Brooklyn days.

“You know: the good music,” she said, when asked which tunes.

But as the days and nights crawled by, Tooter found herself becoming despondent.

“I felt myself getting weaker,” she said. “I started shaking. I hurt so much. I knew I was dying. I thought of all those things I wished I had done and all those people I knew who had died before me and I told myself, ‘Now this is your time.’ “

On the last day before her rescue, she pulled out a Publix grocery receipt and penned a few words to her family.

Those thoughts she did not care to share Friday.

“They were so personal,” she said.

Justin saved her, she said. “I would be dead without him.”

Reporters asked the teen to talk about his role. He did not know what to say. He was just happy, he said, that he found Tooter. He was reunited with her again Thursday night in her hospital room.

Tooter said she embraced him and kissed him, twice.

“I’d like to adopt him,” she said, jokingly, “if his mother will let me.”

Tooter said she also thinks the world of the fire rescue crews who then came quickly to extract her.

She was amused at the questions of the paramedic who rappelled down the steep embankment and started asking her questions to test her alertness: her name, address, phone number, and the flight number of Lori’s plane.

She said she answered all the questions correctly.

No arrests have been made in the hit-and-run, but investigators are looking at the driver of a car found wrecked just east of the bridge.

Tooter places the blame on whoever the other driver is, but she’s happy to be alive.

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

ON THE ROSIE O’DONNELL SHOW

Published Sept. 28, 2000

Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue Lt. Michael Hicks - the officer who led the rescue of Tillie Tooter - watched with a smile as the 83-year-old grandmother appeared on the Rosie O’Donnell show Wednesday and told her story of courage and survival.

Hicks, who watched the show at a downtown fire station, grinned as Tooter joked with Rosie. “I am so glad she is doing so well. She was in really bad shape.”

Then he added softly, “This one was special for me. Something similar had happened in my family, to my grandfather. He was missing for five days after going out on a boat on Lake Placid. They found his body floating in the lake on the fifth day. This one definitely touched me.”

Tooter told Rosie and America how she had given up hope by the third day and made peace with herself. Her car had been struck and knocked over a bridge on Interstate 595 as she left her Pembroke Pines apartment for the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport around 3 a.m. on Aug. 12. It crashed through trees and landed nearly 60 feet below, on its side in a swamp, trapping her inside.

“I screamed blue murder for help for 10 minutes,” Tooter said, thinking she would be rescued immediately by other drivers she had seen on the road. She did not realize that her tree-covered car could not be seen from the road, or that other drivers had called to report the accident but no one stayed at the scene to show rescuers where the car went.

Tooter explained how she survived on a piece of hard candy, a stick of gum and a cough drop, along with rainwater she caught in a steering wheel cover. She also tore a button off her blouse and sucked on it to produce moisture in her mouth. “I saw that in an old John Wayne movie,” she told Rosie. “And it worked.”

Just as she was giving up hope, Tooter said, “I saw my beautiful hero.” It was 15-year-old Justin Vannelli, who was cleaning trash along the road when he spotted her car’s tire protruding through the heavy brush. Then he thought he saw someone stick their leg out the window and wiggle it at him.

Vannelli, also on Rosie’s show Wednesday, said, “I yelled, ‘Dad, there is someone alive down there.’ “ They called 911.

Within four minutes, Hicks and his engine crew arrived at the scene. “At first, I still couldn’t see a car down there,” Hicks said. “And we weren’t sure there was anybody in it.”

Still, Hicks decided to call for a technical rescue team. But he didn’t wait for them. He hooked up his rappelling gear to a rope tied to the fire engine and led a team with medical equipment to the car. He remembered about 20 feet from the ground being scraped by the tree branches, and then landing in mud nearly a foot thick. They reached the car within two minutes.

As soon as he spotted the silver car and saw the older woman, Hicks thought it might be the missing grandmother he had read about in news reports.

“She was real sluggish,” he recalled. “I asked her name, but she just said, ‘Can you get me out of here?’ “ Her legs were trapped under the crushed dash. Hicks told her they were going to try.

Hicks radioed in that this was probably the missing grandmother, and then assessed what was needed. They covered her with a blanket, inserted intravenous fluids and began treating her injuries. He put a firefighter in the car to monitor her vital signs, and to protect her from falling debris when the work to free her started.

Hicks called for a chain saw so they could cut away about 20 trees from around the car. Then they applied the “jaws of life” device to the car’s roof and folded the roof back so that they could remove Tooter at an angle.

As they placed her on a backboard and into a basket to be lifted to the roadway, Hicks said she demanded, “Don’t forget my purse.” He didn’t. A trooper delivered her stained purse to her at the hospital. Hicks laughed that even after three days down there “she was a feisty one.”

Exactly 61 minutes passed from the moment firefighters received the call to the time they placed Tooter in the ambulance. Hicks said 27 crew members responded to the call, some of whom had to be treated with IV fluids for heat exhaustion at the scene because of the heavy gear they wear and the heat that day.

Within hours of the rescue, Hicks said, Tooter’s family came to the fire station to thank them. But he shuns any hero label with a philosophical touch. “I’m not sure it is ever in our hands in the first place. In the big picture, we are here to help when it is not your time. This was definitely not her time.”

Hicks couldn’t help but smile again as the televised Tooter gave young Justin the keys to a new four-wheel ATV. And Rosie gave Tooter a week’s trip to Las Vegas with four friends to play her favorite Caribbean Poker game.

“I’m really glad it turned out this way,” Hicks said. “Let’s just say in this [firefighter] business, there are a lot more bad days than good ones. This was one of the good ones.”

A YEAR LATER

Published Aug. 15, 2001

It’s hard to forget Tillie Tooter.

The feisty Pembroke Pines grandmother emerged as a hero a year ago today when firefighter-paramedics rescued her three days after her Toyota Tercel plummeted off Interstate 595 into a sweltering bed of swampland brush.

Alone, bloodied and trapped in her car, the 84-year-old sipped rainwater from her steering-wheel cover.

She licked a cough drop and nibbled gum to stay alive.

“I never expected to live through that,” Tooter said Tuesday, as she flashed the same smile she gave after her rescue and recovery last year. “I never expected to be found.”

A year later, Tooter’s strong-willed spirit glows even brighter despite lingering emotional and physical scars from the crash.

“Every breath I take, I am aware of that crash,” says Tooter, sitting in her Century Village apartment at Pembroke Pines. “Life is a beautiful thing. I am getting the most out of it every day.”

Tooter lives by that mantra. It’s hard keeping up with her these days as she fills her calendar with get-togethers and activities - testament to her independence and strong will.

“I enjoy being with my friends. I enjoy playing cards. I just enjoy living and breathing on this earth,” says Tooter.

As busy as she is, the pain remains. The crash left Tooter with a ruptured disc in her neck that aches when she tries to turn.

She now uses a walker to get around. She may soon need an operation on her right shoulder to repair a torn rotator cuff. The injury affects her right hand, so she depends on her left, but it shakes now when she tries to hold a coffee mug.

“It’s the price you have to pay for your life,” says Tooter, who has lived through two world wars and has been widowed twice. “I still have a lot of healing to do.”

Some of that healing is more than skin deep. Although she enjoys talking about her daily grind, she grows silent when asked about the ordeal that began just after 3 a.m. Aug. 12.

The card-playing “keeps her mind away from what happened,” says neighbor and friend Charlotte Zusmer. “When she is alone, she starts to think about the crash a lot.”

Two months after the crash, she took to the wheel in one of her many post-crash gifts - a new white Toyota Corolla.

She stays off I-595.

“I made promises to my children,” Tooter said. “I am not particularly anxious to drive there again. It’s not an easy thing to forget.”

FACING THE SUSPECT IN COURT

Published Feb. 28, 2002

Tillie Tooter and the man who ran her off the road 18 months ago faced each other for the first time Wednesday.

Gingerly stepping into a Broward courtroom with the help of the walker she has needed since the accident, Tooter wiped her eyes as Scott Campbell delivered the apology that was part of his plea agreement reached Tuesday, the first day of his trial.

“I’d like to tell you from the bottom of my heart I am truly sorry for the ordeal you went through,” said Campbell, 22, who will serve five years of probation and pay all of Tooter’s medical bills in exchange for pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, a third-degree felony. “I wanted to apologize to you then, but once my attorneys got involved they were in control of what I could and couldn’t say.”

What Campbell didn’t say during the 15-minute hearing was that he caused Tooter’s ordeal. His attorneys insist he dozed off as he was driving on Interstate 595 on Aug. 12, 2000, and he didn’t know what he had hit. That’s exactly what he told the Highway Patrol trooper who responded to the scene that night, they said.

A month after the accident, Campbell, of Hollywood, was charged with leaving the scene of an accident with injuries, filing a false police report and culpable negligence. He faced five years in prison if convicted on those charges.

“I hope you have learned a lesson from this ordeal,” 85-year-old Tooter told him in court. “I have no bitterness toward you. I did in the beginning, but I don’t anymore. I just hope you make a good life for yourself.”

Tooter said she flt Campbell’s apology came from the heart. “Things will be better for all of us now,” she said. “I feel they have been settled.”

Just after 3 a.m. on Aug. 12, 2000, Tooter was headed east on Interstate 595 from her Pembroke Pines home to pick up her granddaughter at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

Campbell’s car hit her from behind, pushing her over a concrete barrier and into the sweltering swamp below.

Campbell stopped - his attorneys say immediately, prosecutors say a mile down the road - and called his father from his cellphone. Two witnesses called 911. One caller was routed to the Florida Highway Patrol and said they’d seen a serious accident. The other caller was routed to Fort Lauderdale Fire-Rescue and said they’d seen a car pushed over the concrete barrier and into the swamp below.

The trooper who responded to the scene arrived to find Campbell’s car with front-end damage. Campbell’s attorneys say he told the trooper he’d fallen asleep and thought he hit the concrete retaining wall, but he wasn’t sure. The trooper was not told about the 911 caller who had seen Tooter pushed over the wall.

Three days later, a teenager picking up garbage alongside the highway spotted Tooter’s car in the underbrush.

While trapped in her car, Tooter had only cough drops and gum to eat. She drank rain-water she caught in her steering wheel cover, and sucked on a button to make herself salivate.

The octogenarian’s tale of urban survival drew a frenzy of national media attention, as Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN and others clamored for hospital-bed interviews with her.

“I’m glad it’s over,” she said Wednesday, surrounded by television cameras, photographers and reporters as she was wheeled out of the courthouse in a wheelchair.

But the civil side of the case isn’t over. Campbell’s repayment of Tooter’s medical bills - which haven’t yet been tallied - will end her lawsuit against him. She will continue to sue FHP and Fort Lauderdale Fire-Rescue, the agencies that responded to the accident and didn’t find her, her lawyer Terry Rosenblum said.

Campbell’s attorneys, Yale Galanter and Lee Cohn, said Wednesday that FHP and Fort Lauderdale Fire-Rescue share blame for what happened to Tooter. “The focus should really be on the 911 system and why the FHP trooper wasn’t informed of the caller who’d seen a car go over the wall,” Galanter said.

Prosecutor Gregg Rossman said the trooper and Fire Rescue personnel did a good job, but couldn’t have spotted Tooter because Campbell didn’t tell them he’d pushed her car over the wall.

Campbell’s parents spoke privately with Tooter after the sentencing. “They’re both heartbroken,” Tooter said afterward. “They wanted to speak with me, and I’m glad they did because they seemed to be very nice, honest, sincere people. And they’re grateful to me.”

Neither Campbell nor his parents spoke with the media.

“Scott is a really shy individual,” Galanter said, addressing the media as his client sat nearby with a probation officer, reviewing the rules he’ll have to follow. “He really doesn’t have the desire to stand up here and make a statement. He said what he had to say in front of Ms. Tooter and [Broward Circuit] Judge [Paul] Backman.”

Backman told Campbell if he behaves well on probation, it could end after two and a half years instead of five.

“Everyone is quite lucky here,” Backman said. “Ms. Tooter for being alive, and for the goodness she sees in you. I hope you’ve learned a lesson and that I’m not going to be seeing you again.”