Young boy buried under rubble until family dog comes to the rescue: ‘I thought I was all alone’

An 11-year-old child from North Carolina is lucky to be alive after a mudslide in the mountains buried him under several feet of debris.

The young kid named Jamie Parker reportedly screamed for help from underneath nearly 12 feet of rubble after a mudslide slammed into his house, throwing him under the stairs and trapping him in the process. His grandmother, Donna Johns, ended up on the roof of the home, calling for her husband Michael, Jamie, and Jamie’s sister, Jemma.

All of a sudden I felt the house go like this and I saw walls coming at me and I thought, ‘What?’” she recalled.

“I had yelled for Jamie and Jemma and Michael and nobody answered me. I didn’t know if everybody was dead, and I was screaming my head off,” Johns continued.

Jamie recounted the horrifying moment of the disaster, and how he was convinced he would die trapped in the debris.

“It was scary, I thought I was all alone. I thought they went down. I thought my family had died,” he said.

“It felt like forever down there,” Jamie added. “I couldn’t see sunlight. I could feel water dripping on me, and I thought I was either gonna drown or run out of air.”

“I was screaming at the top of my lungs, and my grandma couldn’t hear me.”

That’s when Tucker, the family dog, began whining and barking, trying to alert the family to the boy’s whereabouts.

“He stayed on top of the pile and was barking away, and I just thought he was going crazy,” Grandfather Michael Johns explained. “I didn’t realize he had located the boy!”

The dog stood his ground until firefighters arrived on the scene and used chainsaws to extricate Jamie.

“Since he has big ears and a big nose, I think he could hear me and smell me,” the kid theorized. “He was trying to tell them where I was.”

Jamie recounted the tale of how Tucker came into the family, saying the kids used their allowance money to save him just in time as he was scheduled to be put down at the shelter.

“He was the last dog there. When he saw us he ran right up to us,” he said. “And he rescued me.”

Jamie was flown to Atrium Health Cabarrus, as the trauma from the mudslide caused a condition that could potentially be deadly. There, the nurses did their best to tend to not only the child but Tucker and the rest of the family who had lost everything in the blink of an eye.

“I’ve been paying for it for over 25 years, and I’m just $4,000 short of paying it off,” Donna said. “My idea was that it would be paid off and we wouldn’t have any mortgage payment — and now it’s all gone.”

The 11-year-old has since been medically cleared, but the staff is allowing them to stay at the hospital since they have no home to return to. Habitat for Humanity is currently running a fundraiser for the family to help them recover from this devastating loss.

Sierra Marlee

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