For this one, we'll have to go all the way back to 1987. On October 16, rescuers pulled 18-month-old Baby Jessica from a well. The young toddler had survived for 60 hours after falling down the well.
She had been playing with four other toddlers at her aunt's home in Texas when the incident happened. Jessica McClure Morales became a national headline. "I didn't know what to do. I just ran in and called the police. They were there within three minutes, but it felt like a lifetime," Jessica's mother, Cissy, told PEOPLE in November 1987.
It was a optimistic and triumph story with rescuers saving Baby Jessica's life. But where is she today? Well, Morales is living a quiet existence in Texas. She is married and appears happy. Her husband Danny remembers watching the story unfold when he was a child.
"They stopped the whole game to say, 'Baby Jessica has been rescued,' " he said. "It was pretty cool." After the rescue, Morales said people established a $1.2 million trust fund for her. That included her husband's mother.
"She went and scrounged every penny she could find to send it to me," Morales said. Her husband "remembers sitting there with her as she held him tight, being thankful that she had them and that it wasn't one of her kids."
Unfortuantely, Morales lost most of the trust fund when the stocks crashed in 2008. Still, she had enough to buy a home for her family and kids. Her two children learned about the incident later in life.
Baby Jessica And Life
Baby Jessica doesn't remember much about the ordeal.
"I learned about it when I was 4 and watched it on Rescue 911 at my then stepmother's house. It was overwhelming. I remember crying. She said, 'You do realize that is about you?' My dad said, 'We were waiting until she was a little bit older to tell her,' " Morales told PEOPLE.
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Morales said she has no memory of being trapped in the well. However, she does carry scars from the 15 surgeries that followed. She has a scar on her forehead and her right foot is smaller than her left from surgery.
"It didn't affect me the way it affected other people. I lived it, but I didn't watch it," she told The New York Times in 2018. Still, she sometimes reflects on how much has changed since the event, telling PEOPLE in April 2024 that it "happened the way it was supposed to."
"I was picked on because of it, but most people are kind and think what happened is an amazing miracle. It is. I don't believe that any of it would've happened without God," she continued.
And yes, Baby Jessica returned to the well.
"Seeing the well for the first time, it was hard but it wasn't upsetting," Morales told PEOPLE in 2019. "To me, it's a symbol that it could have taken my life, but it didn't. I had God on my side that day."
