It was a typical afternoon in late September for David Castleberry. He needed to mow the lawn after work, so he sent 5-year-old Brett inside the house. David was mowing under the plastic playhouse with the lawn tractor as he usually did when he realized something was wrong.
“I pushed the playhouse to where I hadn’t mowed yet,” David recalls, “And the mower tried to die. And I knew that by me pushing it—that it shouldn’t have bogged the mower down like that. I looked down all I seen out from under the mower was Spongebob crocs. His whole body was between the wheels and the deck. I jumped off the mower, and I picked up the mower and just chucked the mower off of him. I looked down and I could see that there was no skin between his wrist and his elbow on either arm. The skin was just wadded up on both sides. And I could see his left hand hanging; it was cut almost in half or more. I picked him up and I carried him across the yard and there was a trail all the way, the sidewalk was soaked with blood, the steps, the porch. I got him to the house and I thought, I need some help.”
David called 911 on his cellphone and ran to his neighbors, Tim and Janice Helms, for help.
“When I was running across the driveway, he stood up on that porch, and was hanging on to that top rail hollering, “Daddy, it hurts,”” David says.
Tim and Janice came immediately but they weren’t prepared for what they saw.
“The first thing I saw was Brett’s face, which was just covered with dirt, mud, and so it just took a second to try to comprehend what’s wrong with him,” Janice says, “And when I looked down, that’s when I saw his arms. It looked like nothing was left. It just—it was horrendous, like what you would see in a horror movie.”
Brett’s dad had second-degree burns from touching the muffler when lifting the mower off of Brett, but that wasn’t what hurt him most.
“At one point he was, you know, saying, ‘I killed my son,'” Janice recalls, “And that’s where I was saying, ‘No, he’s alive, he’s alive. Worst case scenario, David,’ I said, ‘if he loses his arms, you’ve got your son still.'”
Watch the video to see what happened next!
Reprinted with permission from CBN.com. Copyright The Christian Broadcasting Network, Inc., All rights reserved.
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