Where is baby Jessica now: In 1987, when Jessica McClure was just 18 months old, she became an Internet superstar on October 14. This was long before the days of Twitter, Facebook, and even the Internet. The entire country watched in awe as rescue workers fought for nearly 60 hours to free “Child Jessica,” as she became known in the press, from a well. Miraculously, she emerged from the ordeal still very much alive.
Her aunt Jamie Moore runs a daycare out of her house in the Texas oil town of Midland. Jessica was out on the lawn with a few other children while her mother, Cissy, supervised. When Cissy answered the phone, she was only gone for a minute before she heard the other kids screaming that Jessica had fallen into a well that was 22 feet deep but only eight feet wide.
The depth and narrowness of the area, combined with the fact that she was pinned down by a solid stone, made the rescue mission exceptionally difficult, and with each passing hour, worried parents around the world watching their worst nightmare play out on CNN began to doubt their daughter’s ability to make it.
At the 58-hour mark, however, the rescue teams had successfully bored a parallel hole and made a route to the area where child Jessica had been trapped.
Who is baby Jessica?
On October 14, 1987, 18-month-old Jessica McClure Morales (born March 26, 1986; popularly known as “Baby Jessica” in 1987) from Midland, Texas fell down a well in her aunt’s property.
She was stuck in the 8-inch (20-centimeter) well casing about 22 feet (6.7 meters) below ground, and it took rescuers 56 hours to pull her out. Everyone’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure, an ABC television movie from 1989, chronicled the international attention that the event received.
Is Baby Jessica Rescue?
Yes, Firefighters and police in Midland, Texas devised a plan to rescue Jessica by first drilling a parallel shaft to the well in which she was stuck, and then a second horizontal cross-tunnel to bring her to safety. Officials enlisted the aid of local oil drillers in the hopes of quickly freeing McClure, but were disappointed to learn the well was ringed by rock. Because they were made for vertical rather than horizontal drilling, the jackhammers used by the rescuers were equally ineffective.
Waterjet cutting, a relatively new technology, was utilized to break through the rock, and a mining engineer was called in to supervise and manage the rescue operation. By 45 hours after Jessica’s fall into the well, the adjacent shaft and cross-tunnel had been finished. Jessica’s rendition of “Winnie the Pooh” could be heard by rescuers as they drilled.
Ron Short, a roofing contractor, offered to down the elevator shaft. Because he lacked collarbones from birth, he was able to squeeze into small spaces with ease. Paramedic Robert O’Donnell inched his way into the tunnel, wrestled Jessica free from her position wedged within the well with one leg above her forehead, and handed her to a fellow paramedic, who took her up to safety and then to another paramedic, who carried her to a waiting ambulance.
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Where is baby Jessica now?
That “Baby Jessica” is now a fully grown adult is news to no one. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Jessica McClure Morales is not a baby’s name. Jessica, now 34 years old, is still based out of the same house less than 2 miles from where she fell down the well, which measured 22 feet in depth when she was just 18 months old. She still gets referred to as “Baby Jessica” once in a while.
Jessica tied the knot with Daniel Morales in a small, intimate ceremony in 2006. At their wedding, the happy couple erected posters requesting guests not to record or photograph anything. At the childcare where they both worked, Jessica was introduced to Daniel by his sister. Jessica had a baby boy, Simon, in 2007. Sheyenne, her daughter, is also a member of her family.
According to People, in 2017 Jessica was employed as a special education teacher’s helper at a nearby elementary school. Although Jessica still has a diagonal scar on her forehead from the suffering she went through as a young child, there are few other outward reminders of the trauma she experienced.
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She admitted in a 2007 TODAY interview that plastic surgeons themselves could certainly wipe them out, but she chose to keep hers nevertheless. She reflected on this and remarked, “It demonstrates who I am and the fact that I am here and that I could not have been here.”
After Jessica’s successful rescue, she was hospitalized for observation. After gangrene set in after the blood supply to her right foot was severed, doctors had to amputate a toe and reconstruct her foot surgically. In the years after her rescue, Jessica underwent 15 operations.
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