Powerful Story of Jeanette Rescue

3News/ITV Report: Amazing Woman's Rescue in Collapsed Bank in Haiti.


The signs of life are not good in the ruins of Haiti. On day six, the diggers tear at the rubble making survival beneath unlikely.

The scavengers at a bank search for money, not the living.

However, one man looks on believing his wife, a bank worker, just might be alive.

He rushes in every time ground is cleared to search and call her name. Finally, someone hears a noise. He calls for silence, then for his wife Jeanette.

“Okay she’s there,” he yells. “She’s alive!”

They scrape away stones to expose a small hole and allow the first light to reach the woman in six days. Her husband is overwhelmed.

ITV’s reporter Bill Neely is able to hear Jeanette talking and he puts a microphone into the hole to ask her if she is injured.

“Yes, my fingers are broken,” Jeanette replies. “I’m thirsty and I can’t see.”

She then calls out a message for her husband: “Even if I die, I love you so much – don’t forget it.”

The risk of her dying remains as not her husband, nor anyone present, has the equipment to free her.

Suddenly help arrives in the form of firefighters from Los Angeles. They push a tiny camera into the hole and Jeanette is revealed. They get her water and then begin cutting into the cables and beams that surround her.

While the light fades, hope does not.

The first clear sight of her shows dust in her eyes and despite wincing, she is smiling.

“It’s amazing, she’s in incredible shape for the time period she’s been in there,” says Terry Dejournett of the LA Fire Department. “I’m very confident [she will be freed].”

The threat of an aftershock is now the major concern.

On a camera the firefighters have seen Jeanette’s hand pinned under a beam. If it is freed, then she is too. A rescuer reaches her hand and she moans in agony.

Within three hours of first hearing her voice, she emerges.

“Thank you, God,” she says immediately. Astonishingly, she goes on to sing a song about not being afraid of death. She says she always thought she would survive, but she wondered why this had happened to her.

When asked if she thought she would live, she responded simply: “Live? Why not?”

While it was an absolutely remarkable rescue, the chance of finding anyone else alive in the rubble is now very slim.

Jeanette survival is a miracle for her husband, but their experience is the exception in a city of death.

Jeanette is driven away, as if nothing had happened, to see for herself the horror that had been hidden from her.