This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A man thrust the limp body of a 4-year-old into Buzzy Mullahkhel's arms with a grim warning: "I can't feel him for a pulse because I can't feel my hands."
Mullahkhel knelt next to Baylor Andersen on the highway shoulder in Logan Canyon, about 10 feet above the icy river where the child and his family had been trapped in a wrecked car. Baylor's skin was wet, cold and gray.
There was no pulse, not even a faint one.
"Please tell me you know CPR," Mullahkhel begged the woman standing next to him.
On Monday night, two days after a small team of strangers waded waist-deep into Logan River to flip over the car and rescue three drowning children, Baylor was playing and "running around just like nothing ever happened to him," said his father, Roger Andersen, in a news conference at Logan Regional Hospital.
Roger Andersen said he was driving his two children and a friend to go skiing at Beaver Mountain just after noon Saturday when the roads grew slick under light snowfall. Andersen said he slowed as he approached the infamous curve at mile marker 474. Two other vehicles left the road on that stretch of U.S. Highway 89 on Saturday alone, police have said. As many as 30 wrecks have occurred there this winter.
Erik Schaelling, who was with Mullahkhel and helped rescue the children Saturday, said his own wife drove off the road there a few years ago.
"I've probably seen 30 cars in the river in that very location," Roger Andersen said. "A year ago, we stopped [because] a car had gone off the road in that very same location and was down in the river."
On Saturday, Andersen noticed a minivan teetering at the edge of a bridge over the river at the dangerous bend, so he tapped his brakes.
"That one tap was really all that it took," he said. The Honda Accord slid down the embankment and rolled onto its roof, in the river. A driver's side window broke, and icy water gushed into the car while he and the three children hung from their belts, Andersen said. He said he unlatched his safety belt and tried to release his 9-year-old daughter, Mia, from the front passenger seat, but he could not find her.
"I didn't hear any screams," Andersen said. "My daughter ... talks about crying for help. As she'd cry for help, the water would rush into her lungs, and [she wasn't] able to get sounds out."
Andersen went through the broken window to take a breath. He surfaced to find "at least a half-dozen" men charging into the river.
Several of the men tried to get into the overturned car — one reported shooting a gun through a window — but none could reach the children. Mia and Baylor were pinned upside-down underwater; their friend, 9-year-old Kenya Wildman, had twisted her body to keep her head at the surface.
Mullahkhel and Schaelling said they reached the bank just in time to see Andersen and the other men lift the car out of the water and flip it over.
"As I talked later with Trooper [Philip] Rawlinson, he said, 'You know how much a car like yours weighs? Can six or eight guys flip a car that weighs 4,000 pounds — in a river?' " Andersen recounted, choking up. "I said, 'I dont think so.' I felt strongly that we had great help from the people who were there at the scene, but we also had help, I think, from some other forces."
The men pulled the three children out of the car. Only Kenya Wildman remained conscious.
At the riverbank, coats were spread on the gravel. Baylor was laid on one of them as Mullahkhel pleaded for help with CPR.
The woman next to him was a nurse.
She and other volunteers who were trained in first-aid helped resuscitate Baylor while still other motorists collected blankets and clothes for the family, Andersen said. Kenya's father, Dennis Wildman, said a little girl gave her clothing to Kenya after the wet ski clothes were peeled off.
"Now she will not take those clothes off," Wildman said.
Baylor and Mia Andersen were flown to Primary Children's, while Kenya stayed at Logan Regional. All three children were home from the hospital by Monday night, though Mia and Baylor were released on the condition that they not have visitors because they remain at risk of developing pneumonia.
Roger Andersen and his wife, Mindy, made one exception Monday: Kenya came to play.
ealberty@sltrib.comTwitter: erinalberty