Told to Stay Home This Dad Hired a Helicopter What He Found Will Break Your Heart
This father wasn’t about to sit idle and hope for the best.
Imagine your child vanishing and authorities advising you to simply stay put. Could you really just wait, hands folded, doing nothing? Most couldn’t. He didn’t.
Tony Lethbridge refused to sit back while his 17-year-old son Samuel disappeared without a trace
It had been 24 hours since the Australian father had last heard from his son.
Seventeen-year-old Samuel Lethbridge had left the Central Coast of New South Wales to visit his girlfriend in nearby Blacksmiths a short drive away. But he never showed up.
“They told us maybe he ran off, maybe he got distracted, maybe something else entirely,” Tony recounted to Fairfax Media. “But we knew this wasn’t like him. This was out of character.”
The police began their standard procedures.
“And so we waited,” Tony said. “They told us to go home and wait.”
It gnawed at him quietly, then loudly until he had to act
A strange instinct tugged at Tony an unshakable sense that Samuel had been in a car accident somewhere along the Pacific Highway. The thought wasn’t random. He recalled a tragic story of someone who’d crashed in the same area, left undiscovered for days, only to be found too late. Tony refused to let history repeat itself not with his son.
“The bush out there is so dense, if a car veers off the road, it vanishes. You won’t spot it from the ground,” he said plainly. “Your only chance is from the sky. So that’s exactly where we went.”
Tony rushed to the nearest airport, pulled out $1,000 in cash, and offered it on the spot to the first helicopter pilot he found begging him to help search for his missing son.
Within minutes and just a short stretch from home Samuel’s car was spotted. He was alive, barely clinging on, dehydrated after being trapped inside for 30 harrowing hours. His body bore the brutal aftermath: a shattered thigh bone piercing through flesh, a broken arm, a dislocated elbow, and multiple fractures. The wreckage told a story of pain, survival, and sheer will.
“We were overwhelmed with relief when we received confirmation from the ground that Sam was still alive despite not knowing how badly he was hurt,” the helicopter company shared with The Sydney Morning Herald. “It’s been a privilege to assist this family in such a critical moment, and we genuinely look forward to meeting Sam when he’s on the mend.”
They didn’t just help save Samuel’s life they went a step further
“Just when we thought Skyline Aviation had already gone above and beyond for my brother and our family, they returned the $1,000 we paid for the flight that helped find him,” Samuel’s sister shared in a heartfelt Facebook post. “From the depths of my soul thank you.”
Article Sources: Jessica Brow
