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Texas Boy Falls Down A Well, Gets Rescued By Neighbors

Jaxson Tune, 9, and some neighborhood kids were playing in a vacant lot near the Airport Mobile Home Park in Mineral Wells, Texas, on March 21.  Tune was apparently doing pull-ups on a bar above a well when he fell 40 feet. 

“All I remember is waking up with one light above me and I was very cold and I didn’t know what was going on,” Tune said. 

Tune’s family panicked, but luckily their neighbors Joshua Richard and Christopher Hicks stayed calm and rushed to the well.  They found a long strap to lower Hicks down into the well shaft.  The water came up to Hicks’ chest, but he was able to brace himself and pull Tune onto his lap. 

Richard and others pulled them to safety.  Though Tune suffered from a skull fracture and had to undergo surgery, he was released from the hospital on March 23.  Tune is happy to be out of the well. “ I feel great since I get to go home.  I get to sleep in my own bed again,” he said. 

"I'm just glad I was able to be around and he was around when we did (act), because there's no telling what would have happened to that little boy," Richard told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. 

Hicks brushed off the praise. " I don't consider myself a hero," Hicks said. " I did what any good-natured human would do.  They're calling me a hero, an angel; I'm not.  I'm just a normal human being.” 

Teresa Degarmo, Tune’s mother, was grateful for her neighbors’ quick thinking. “' Thank you', is all I can say.  Very blessed, very blessed.  Don’t know what we would have done if they wouldn’t have been there.”