13-Year-Old Boy Who Survived 12 Hours in L.A. Sewer Pipe Speaks Out

13-year-old Jesse Hernandez is lucky to be alive after he fell in a hole and was trapped in a Los Angeles sewer pipe for 13 hours before he was eventually rescued.

On Easter Sunday, Jesse was at a family Easter celebration in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park when he fell through a wooden plank over the sewer. He was jumping on the wooden planks in an abandoned building that was decommissioned by the Bureau of Sanitation when he fell 25 feet into the 4-foot-wide pipe. He was stuck in toxic sewage overnight while over 100 rescue workers tried to find him.

Jesse intentionally left his handprints along the inside of the intricate pipe system to leave clues about his location. That ended up being a lifesaver because the handprints were caught on the cameras that were sent through the sewer pipes and helped lead them to Jesse’s location over 3/4 of a mile from where he fell. Jesse was waiting below a manhole under a Los Angeles subway in hopes of being rescued.

“I stopped myself because the little tunnel started getting smaller, so I just stood up fast. I just stood up there for the last 13 hours,” Jesse said. He also remarked that he was hit with sewer water for hours. “I was thinking, like, ‘I’m gonna die.'”

Video of the rescue is below.

Jesse was cold and hungry when they found him. He also immediately apologized to his parents for losing his phone during his overnight ordeal surrounded by sewage. His father obviously didn’t care about the phone when he had his son back.

“The water took me,” the teen said. “I was just praying to God to help me and to not die.”

The teen reports that the smell was “nasty.” He had to go through a decontamination process to clean the toxic sewage and fumes from his body. Jesse didn’t know if he was going to make it out alive.

Jesse’s interview about his miracle rescue can be viewed in the video below.

Jesse was incredibly wise to leave clues for the rescuers. That very likely may have saved his life and is not something that many young teens would have thought about.

Share this if you are glad Jesse is safe!

Source: People