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| Saturday, 01 January 2005 |
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Mother makes agonising choice in tsunami chaos SYDNEY, Friday (Reuters) Mother of two Jillian Searle had to choose between her children when she made a life-or-death decision. Swept up by mountainous tsunami waves at a Thai resort, she could not hold on to both her young sons and survive. Fighting to stay above the surging waters, she had to choose which one would have to take his chances in the swirling, debris-strewn torrent. "I knew I had to let go of one of them and I just thought I'd better let go of the one that's the oldest," Searle, from the Western Australian city of Perth, told Sky News television in a report broadcast on Thursday. Searle said she was near the hotel pool on the southern Thai resort island of Phuket with her sons Lachie, 5, and two-year-old Blake when the waves struck. "A lady grabbed hold of him for a moment but she had to let him go because she was going under," she said referring to Lachie. "And I was screaming, trying to find him, and we thought he was dead," she told reporters on arrival back in Australia. Lachie was found alive about two hours later clinging to a door and, though traumatised by his ordeal, looked uninjured as his mother spoke to reporters. She was accompanied by the two boys and their father, Brad, who had watched the drama helplessly from their first-floor hotel room. |
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