Hero sisters
A day before the world started celebrating the achievements of women, two Jamaican sisters threw caution to the wind when they jumped into the Rio Cobre and saved a motorist from drowning.
Zina and Cassandra Slew, while happy that they had rescued the man, appeared unexcited by their heroics, telling the Jamaica Observer that pulling motorists from the treacherous river is “something we do all the time”.
Zina said she didn’t see when the car ran off the road, but heard when the vehicle hit the water about 8:30 am.
“I turned around and when I looked, I saw the car sinking,” she said, adding that she ran to the bank of the river, took her clothes off, and jumped in.
“When I got there to try to get him out of the vehicle, he was actually trapped. The windows were up and the doors couldn’t open. I was there hitting the glass. Then my sister came with a hatchet and we used it to break the rear wind shield, because by that time most of the car was under the water and we knew we couldn’t break the windows,” she explained.
“My sister got some cuts on her fingers from the broken glass, then we saw him push out his hand and we pulled him up,” she said.
“I’m so happy, because at one point I felt so disappointed because time was going and we thought he had drowned by now. But when we break out the glass and wi see him hand come out, to be honest, we didn’t expect him to be still alive,” she said.
“Mi just glad that he came out alive.”