Mother Tells 4 Children to Leave Her Behind After Plane Crash in Amazon. Here's How They Survived 40 Days in Rainforest
Magdalena Mucutuy, an indigenous leader, survived four days after the crash.
Four children who were involved in a plane crash over the Colombian Amazon rainforest were miraculously rescued, after surviving over a month without the help of any adults. According to reports, the Cessna 206 aircraft experienced engine problems minutes after takeoff on May 1 and disappeared out of the sky. Magdalena Mucutuy, an Indigenous leader, and her children, aged 13, nine, five, and one, were missing for 40 days until a rescue team located the plane in the jungle. More details have been revealed as to what happened when the plane went down and how the children survived the ordeal.
"My mom is dead," one of the children told rescuers almost immediately after being located. According to the children's father, Manuel Miller Ranoque, who has been reunited with them, their mother survived four days after the plane went down but offered some important survival advice to them.
"The one thing that (eldest daughter Lesly) has cleared up for me is that, in fact, her mother was alive for four days," he told reporters outside of the Bogota hospital where his children are recovering. According to the father, the mother helped them stay alive.
"Before she died, their mom told them something like, 'You guys get out of here. You guys are going to see the kind of man your dad is, and he's going to show you the same kind of great love that I have shown you.'"
"The eldest daughter, Lesly, with the little one in her arms, ran towards me. Lesly said: 'I'm hungry,'" Nicolas Ordonez Gomes, one of the members of the initial rescue crew, revealed in an interview with public broadcast channel RTVC over the weekend. "One of the two boys was lying down. He got up and said to me: 'My mom is dead.'"
"We immediately followed up with positive words, saying that we were friends, that we were sent by the family, the father, the uncle. That we were family!" he added.
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Two other adults, including the pilot, died in the crash. "The survival of the children is a sign of the knowledge and relationship with the natural environment that is taught starting in the mother's womb," the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Colombia said in a statement.