A mother is holding her daughter a little closer tonight after a vehicle accident in Vinton caused quite a scare.
“I got a message on my phone from Life360 telling me my mom was possibly in an accident,” Kayla Dennis said. “I called her and she didn’t answer.”
Body camera footage shows Vinton police officer David Lyons moments before jumping in a canal after a vehicle accident.
Dennis said her mother Pamela and daughter Ellyse were on there way home when she received a message from Life360, a location sharing app.
Dennis called a friend who lived near where the app said a potential accident occurred.
“I called Vinton PD, who said my mom had went off the interstate into the canal, but that was all they could tell me,” Dennis said.
“We received a call for a crash with injuries, but that was the extent of the actual information we had,” Lyons said.
“When Sgt. Lavergne arrived on the scene, he said there was a car in the canal,” Lyons said.
When Officer Lyons arrived on scene, he said without hesitation he and Officer Lavergne were in the canal trying to save Dennis’ mother and daughter.
At that point, the car was nearly completely submerged. Pamela was able to push her granddaughter through the car’s back window, but officers say what happened next was a miracle.
“It was only after the car went full under, we still had her and we pulled her right out,” Lyons said.
Dennis is thankful for an app she never knew would come in handy, but even more so for officers who saved her mother and daughter.
“If I would’ve never gotten the message, I would have never known that anything had happened to them, or if that officer hadn’t been sitting right there, they wouldn’t be here,” Dennis said.
“We don’t do it for the glory, we simply do what God put us on the planet to do,” Lyons said.
Dennis said both her daughter and her mother were okay after the accident.