Tom McTevia and Tina Hoisington were killed April 19 when the ATV McTevia was driving veered off a mountain road in Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho, and rolled 1,000 feet down a steep embankment. McTevia’s Dachshund, Daisy, had been with them, but she was not found at the accident site.
Some of McTavia’s friends descended the cliff to the crash site early last week, but did not see Daisy.
On Saturday, McTevia’s family and friends once again organized a search party. Using ropes, five men climbed down the rocky cliff, while others waited above with two-way radios.
“All of a sudden, from the radio we heard, ‘We found the dog,'” Tonya Reed, a friend of McTevia’s since childhood, told the Coeur d’Alene Press. “It gave me chills.”
It was McTevia’s son, Ryan, who found Daisy. She was in a small hole near a tree, not far from where the ATV had landed.
When they heard Daisy was alive, Reed said the group began cheering — and crying.
“There’s no reason that dog should be alive when we found her,” Reed’s husband, Rob, told KREM. “It never crossed my mind that in that steep of terrain, six days later in that kind of country, she was alive. Yeah, I can use the word ‘miracle’ on that. It’s amazing. It really is.”
The group rushed Daisy to a veterinarian. Amazingly, she had no injuries from the crash and no health issues from being stranded for nearly a week.
McTevia, a Navy veteran and former police officer, had been paralyzed by a spinal cord injury in an ATV accident in 2004. He became an advocate for people with physical challenges.
“To have this little bit of hope, and something to hang on to, to cheer for and love the way that he would have, that is just golden,” Dena Hankins, a friend of McTevia’s, told the Coeur d’Alene Press. Daisy is staying with McTevia’s sister.
This is the second time in a week that a Dachshund has been in the news for surviving being stranded for days. A Miniature Dachshund named Lucy was stuck under a concrete slab for 13 days in her backyard before her pet parents found her last week. Like Daisy, Lucy had no injuries or health issues due to her ordeal.
“We can’t believe there was no organ failure,” Lucy’s vet, Dr. Kelly Miller, told the Wichita Eagle. “Fourteen days without water, you expect the kidneys to have not survived through that. She somehow managed to make it. It’s amazing.”
And Daisy is not the only dog who has miraculously survived a horrific crash. Earlier this year, Harley, a Maltese/Terrier mix, was the only survivor when the car he was in plunged 150 feet off a freeway in Chatsworth, Calif. Harley stayed in the car with the bodies of his dog mom, Gwen Bolden-Smith, and the driver, Diijon Bishop, until help arrived. He has been adopted by a friend of Bolden-Smith’s.
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