Father who put 5-year-old son on roof to escape sharks helplessly watches as Hurricane Dorian winds sweep away his little boy
A father who saw his five-year-old son washed away in a powerful storm surge brought about by Hurricane Dorian has spoken out about the tragedy and said he's holding on to the hope that the young boy is still alive. Adrian Farrington, 38, was desperately trying to keep himself and his son, Adrian Farrington Jr., afloat after he had fractured his leg while trying to swim them to safety in the torrential waters that had consumed their home on Abaco Island in northwestern Bahamas this week, according to the Nassau Guardian.
He said the water was so high he could have "taken my elbow and I could've put it on the roof to get up on the roof."
After an hour of treading in the unruly waters, Farrington put him on top of the roof of a house, hoping that it would prove safer than the murky waters. But before he could sit on the roof to hold the boy, "a gust of wind from the hurricane dragged him across the roof and back into the surge on the other side."
He said he pushed the debris aside and quickly rushed to the other side to get to his son, but in the brief amount of time it took him to get there, the five-year-old was already gone.
"I could still remember him reaching for me and calling me, 'Daddy,'" he said, holding back tears. "I was feeling to see if I could feel some kind of cloth, some kind of clothes, some kind of skin, flesh, tennis, something."
"I ain’t find nothing. I come back up. I hold my breath and I gone back down again. All this time, people carried my wife to safety and they calling me, but I ain’t want to go because I didn’t want to leave my son."
But after a tiring search yielded no signs of Adrian, he had no choice but to move to higher ground.
Farrington found safe ground in a church, but even that was short-lived. The walls of the building collapsed, and while the 38-year-old managed to escape, several others weren't so lucky. He said he "watched like 12 to 15" people die in less than an hour.
He bore the brunt of the storm for the rest of the night and had to be carried to a local hospital the next morning. From there, he was flown to Nassau and transported to Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH), where he is being treated for lacerations on his hand and two fractured bones in his right leg.
He still doesn't know if his son is alive or dead. "If he [is] rescued, I praise the lord," he said. "What I saw when I lose him, anything could happen," he said. "You had sharks swimming in the water, anything could happen. A 5-year-old in that type of search, they don't stand much a chance."