13-Year-Old Fighting For His Life After Surviving For Days At Bottom Of Ravine Without Food Or Water
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Survival

13-Year-Old Fighting For His Life After Surviving For Days At Bottom Of Ravine Without Food Or Water

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A 13-year-old has survived days at the bottom of a ravine without food or water. But his fight isn't over. He remains hospitalized in critical condition from his brush with death.

Dakota "Cody" Trenkle Jr. first disappeared on July 27. The teen had been skateboarding in Goose Creek Lake, Missouri. According to the St. Francois County Sheriff's Office, Trenkle Jr. vanished afterward. His mother, Stephanie Neely, says police initially dismissed her concerns, labeling him a runaway.

Her sister, Brittney Van Volkenburg, a volunteer firefighter, organized a search with the fire department to look for the missing teen. "We had volunteers bring in their drones, and offers of dogs," Neely says. "We never stopped looking for him."
After finding his skateboard, she called detectives to request help from the K-9 unit in searching a local ravine. Fortunately, the Farmington Correctional Center (FCC) K-9 unit deployed a bloodhound to search the ravine. The dog located the teen in under half an hour after finding his scent.
Trenkle was at the bottom of the ravine "in approximately one foot of water in a wet weather creek, 540 yards from his skateboard, with a 240-foot elevation change." They transported him to a hospital in St. Louis. Doctors discovered that he had a brain bleed. Medical staff placed him in a medically induced coma.

Bottom Of Ravine

Neely believes that because her son was found "partially in the water, it did allow his body temperature to stay cooler, and helped him absorb some of the water to keep him partially hydrated."

Unfortunately, it also caused him to develop "a lot of infectious bacteria" and pneumonia as well.

"Since then, I have been at the hospital, by his bedside in PICU watching him fight for his life in critical condition," Neely told People. "There is no leg injury, but severe head trauma, including several brain bleeds. Right now he is on a lot of mechanical support, and will be for quite some time."

"We are actively fighting to try and get him stable, but all the cards are stacking against him," she also said. "He is still not breathing on his own, and we have found another fracture on his skull, creating a massive soft spot on the right side of his head."

Unfortunately, recovery is slow after falling into the ravine.

"There is still no real progress in his recovery. This is going to be a long, slow, uphill battle," she wrote. "Cody will make some progress for a few hours, but then he will decline rapidly, and it will take his team several hours to get him stable-ish again. So, for now, we do our best to keep him as comfortable as possible. and help his body keep fighting," she wrote.