On October 14, 1987, Jessica McClure was probably the most talked about person in the world.
Known as “Baby Jessica,” she made headlines at 18-months old when she fell into a well in the backyard of her aunt’s house in Midland, Texas.
Rescuers took about 58 hours to retrieve her, while the world rooted for her. She remained without food or water the whole time, but by some miracle she was alive when she was pulled out of the 8-inch well.
30 years later, the world is still curious about Baby Jessica and she is answering questions about her miraculous life after her near-death experience.
While the media was busy sensationalizing her accident, baby Jessica and her family were trying to get things back to normal.
Due to the gangrene from the loss of circulation in one of her legs while in the well, doctors were forced to amputate one of Jessica’s toes. In the subsequent years, she’s had over 15 surgeries and the scars to remind her of what she went through.
The miracle baby is all grown up and now goes by Jessica McClure Morales. She married Daniel Morales in 2006 after meeting at the daycare centre where she worked. The happily married couple share two children, Simon, 9 and Sheyenne, 7.
31-year-old Jessica now works as a special-education teacher’s aide in an elementary school. She and her family live in a house that she purchased with the funds from a trust fund that was set up by people around the world.
“I think it’s amazing that people would come together like that to donate money to a child that was not theirs,” she tells people.com.
Although she has some some signs of the incident and sometimes answers to the moniker ‘Baby Jessica,’ she tells people.com that she doesn’t recall much about what happened three decades ago and she is currently healthy.
“I had God on my side that day,” Jessica says in the interview. “My life is a miracle.”
In a video posted on Twitter, Jessica shows her markings of a survivor including her noticeably smaller right foot (a result of gangrene that occurred while her foot was above her head in the well) and a scar on her forehead caused by the drilling.
Jessica has spoken to her children about that fateful day in ’87 and thanks to Google, they had visual aides that depict the rescue efforts.
She says she doesn’t want her story to overshadow her kids, but she uses the incident to teach them a lesson about being humble and to “remember that if you look hard enough, there are so many good people in this world.”
Do you remember Baby Jessica’s story?