A weekend vigil to pray for the return of a missing Maryland college freshman turned into a celebration Saturday after the young man miraculously crawled up an embankment from a ravine where he had crashed his car a week earlier.
Julian McCormick, an 18-year-old freshman at Bowie State University in Maryland, was spotted by a passerby Saturday. He was bruised, disoriented and dehydrated, but alive.
“Oh God,” his father, James McCormick, said, unable to control his emotions. “Such a burden relieved.”
McCormick had left the Bowie State campus around noon Sept. 1. He was on his way to pick up his girlfriend in College Park, Md., when he lost control of his Honda Civic near his home in rural Laurel, Md., and drove off the road into a ravine.
The car tumbled down the embankment, landing upside down in a creek under a bridge. It’s heavily traveled stretch of road that his friends and family members passed repeatedly in the last week as the search for the young man intensified.
For the last week, according to authorities, he drifted in and out of consciousness. Police said it took McCormick, trapped upside down, two days to free himself from his seat belt. He had no food and reportedly used a shoe to collect stream water to drink.
[Thanks, Nathan!]