Heartbreaking audio has been released of a distraught beachgoer calling 911 moments after 7-year-old Sloane Mattingly was buried to death on a Florida beach. The girl’s panicked mother can be heard screaming desperately as she tries to rescue her daughter. .
“I’m on the beach in front of High Noon, and there’s a child and they’re trying to get out,” a female caller told a 911 operator. released NBC 6 South Florida airs Wednesdays.
On this call, “a large number of people [were] The girl’s father could be heard “screaming for help” and told the operator that his daughter was “trapped in a hole in the sand.”
“The mother is screaming, ‘My daughter is there,'” she said.
“Everyone was screaming,” the woman said, as the 911 call continued and frantic attempts to rescue the girl could be heard from all around her.
The operator told the woman that paramedics had been sent to the beach, but the beachgoer revealed that rescuers had not yet been able to “rescue the child” and were still “excavating.”
911 asked the caller what part of the child’s body was trapped and was told the girl’s “entire body” was still under the sand.
She was asked by the operator if the child’s head was in the sand, but she replied, “I can’t see the head,” as others continued to frantically dig Sloan out. .
The caller then said that the sheriff’s office had arrived as rescuers were waiting for the fire brigade to help.
“They need help,” the woman says. “They really are.”
As the operator continued to question the woman about what was happening at the scene, she was heartbroken by the sound of the girl’s mother crying.
“Oh, this mom…oh, this is awful,” she says.
The dispatcher asked, “Is the officer with the child?” A broken scream could be heard in the background, the woman answered with a somber expression, “Yes,” and the call ended.
Sloan remained submerged in the sand for about 20 minutes before being pronounced dead.
The girl and her family were vacationing from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Fort Lauderdale, when the tragedy occurred around 3 p.m. Tuesday.
She and her brother Maddox Mattingly, 9, were digging a hole when the sand caved in on top of them.
The weight of the sand that poured into the 5- to 6-foot-deep hole completely buried the girl and her brother up to his chest.
Maddox was pulled through the ordeal by his father, Jason Mattingly.
Both children were rushed to Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, where Sloan was pronounced dead.
Harrowing mobile phone footage captured the moment desperate beachgoers and rescue workers used their hands and anything they could lay their hands on to dig the girl out.
Rescuers used support boards to prevent sand from returning to the hole during excavation.
“This was an unfathomable accident,” Pompano Beach Fire Rescue spokeswoman Sandra King said in a statement following the girl’s tragic death.
The incident remains under investigation, according to police.
