If it wasn't for a broken GPS, Hunter Haire and Zach Sawin might never have saved Miguel Hernandez's life.
Haire, a freshman kicker at Wake Forest, and Sawin, a freshman offensive lineman at Colgate, along with four other high school buddies from Lake Mary, Fla., were home for winter break on Dec. 15 and they were looking for a friend's house. Their GPS led them in the wrong direction, so they stopped in the parking lot of Reflection Lake to regroup.
From their parking spot Sawin noticed a car bobbing in the lake about 50 yards offshore, and within moments Haire and Sawin had jumped into the lake.
Haire got the driver, Hernandez, to roll down the window of his gray 2008 Mazda, and then Haire swam in and unhooked the seat belt. Sawin grabbed Hernandez by the shoulders, and together he and Haire two of them pulled Hernandez to shore.
Haire and Sawin's four friends, Mike D'Agostino, Kyle Swink, Dave Moore and Mark Lang, also dove into the lake and checked the car to make sure no one else was in it. Right after Sawin pulled Hernandez out of the car, it sank to the bottom of the lake.
"I just hope these guys know how grateful I am, and my whole family is, that they were willing to get out of their car and put their lives on the line to help my brother out," Manny Hernandez, brother of Miguel, told the Orlando Sentinel. "My brother feels like God personally reached out and saved his life. It's given him a whole new perspective on things."
The incidental but extremely fortunate timing of the events was not lost on Sawin.
"If the GPS had not broken," Sawin told the Sentinel, "if we didn't stop at the lake, if it had been a few minutes later, things could have been much different."
(H/T to Off the Bench)
