Two Vancouver Island parents are expressing their profound relief and gratitude after kind strangers helped rescue their twin daughters from a potentially deadly vehicle fire last week.
Shane and Dawnae Onody said their 18-month-old girls were on a short outing with their grandmother, who had borrowed their car, when it started to break down on the Trans-Canada Highway near the Burnside exit ramp on July 28.
Shane said his grandmother felt the vehicle losing power, slowed to a stop and began frantically trying to take the kids out once passing motorists alerted her to smoke wafting from its insides. A stranger pulled over to help extract them, and all four ran for it seconds before the car burst into flames.
“We’re both trying to not think about the what-ifs. Luckily our children are safe, our mom is safe and all the things we lost are replaceable, really,” Shane said in a Monday interview.
“We’re so happy to see the people who stopped by. What a blessing. It’s overwhelming, a lot of emotions going. I don’t even know how to feel.”
It’s still unclear what went wrong with the family vehicle, but Shane said the “horrific phone call” he got from his mother in the aftermath of the incident is seared into his memory for life.
“Just to hear, ‘Car’s on fire, completely totalled, we’re all on the side of the road and we’re okay’ … my mom’s panic made me panic, which made my wife panic. I didn’t have any information, I didn’t know where they were,” he recalled.
His father-in-law was able to pick him and Dawnae up and bring them to the accident scene, where he said they parked behind a fire track, ran past their burning vehicle and saw the girls waving.
Mark Phoenix was the passerby who stopped and helped the grandmother get little Everly and Adeline out of the car — a feat given all the safety features of the twins’ car seats. He said he was driving behind the vehicle, noticed the driver’s “jerking motions,” and the smoke coming from its insides.
“It was just time to take action, jump in and see what I could do,” Phoenix said in an interview.
“She was just frantically trying to get them out. She had basically unhooked one and I just asked her to step back. I handed her the one child, I jumped in and grabbed the other child, quickly grabbed her purse and we literally left the vehicle immediately.”
He said they had made it between 50 and 70 feet from the vehicle in a matter of seconds before “flames just started pouring out of the fender wells.”
“By that time, another gentleman had pulled over in a much bigger vehicle, so we had a nice big safe place for the family,” he added. “It’s all good.”
His chats with Shane and Dawnae since the incident have made him weep, he said.
“Him keep calling me the family hero, and mom just put me to tears; I was sobbing probably for a good half hour after that conversation, it was extremely touching at the time,” Phoenix said.
“I always be that guy that runs to the fire, I guarantee it.”
Dawnae said her “nerves have come down” since last week — replaced by appreciation. Addressing Phoenix directly, she said she is “forever grateful.”
“I am a believer of fate and timing and it just sounds like he was there at the right time. He knew what was happening, he felt it,” she told Global News.
“He didn’t know we had twins in the back. It was his actions that made the biggest difference and now we can say that we have our girls with us.”
A GoFundMe campaign has started online to raise funds for the family, who need to replace everything in the vehicle after nearly two years of being on a single income during parental leave. Items lost include two car seats, a double stroller, toys, and more.
It’s difficult to ask for help, Dawnae added, and the community has already contributed so much in the form of “comments and the messages and the support and love.”
“That’s been a really actually helpful and healing thing for me, at least, because it just distracts me and makes me feel that there are people there that just care.”
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