A family photo shoot nearly ended in tragedy when a wild horse kicked a three-year-old girl in the head, leaving the child fighting for her life.
Haley and Austin Wilkey were enjoying a weekend outing with their four children at Mount Charleston outside Las Vegas when two wild horses approached.
The mother was capturing the moment on video while her two older daughters played near the stallion. As the mother was about to stop recording, disaster struck.
In a split second, the horse lunged at her three-year-old daughter, Olivia, striking her in the head with a powerful kick, her mother said.
‘I thought she had died because she was unresponsive,’ Haley told KVVU.
Panic ensued as a distraught Haley desperately tried to stem the bleeding with the help of a stranger.
‘He had a first aid kit. He gave me gauze, and helped me put pressure on her head until the bleeding slowed a little,’ Haley said. ‘If we let up a little bit of pressure, it would just start flowing again.’
With no cell phone service, the father had to drive down the mountain to call for help. ‘It was like, I think, almost 45 minutes of holding her head shut waiting for the ambulance to come,’ Haley explained.
Olivia was airlifted to a Las Vegas hospital, where she underwent three-hour emergency surgery to repair her skull. She suffered a severe skull fracture and bleeding in her brain, as well as a contusion on her brain and a severe concussion.
Doctors monitored her closely for 12 hours before the procedure.
‘I’ll make payments the rest of my life, I don’t care. Just get her to safety,’ Olivia’s father, Austin, told KLAS, expressing the family’s overwhelming relief that their daughter was alive.
According to a GoFundMe page set up by the Wilkeys, Olivia was released from the hospital and is healing at home.
In terms of recovery, the family said, ‘we know she has a long road ahead, but a very optimistic one.’
The family is eternally grateful to the strangers who came to their aid, including the Good Samaritan who helped staunch Olivia’s bleeding.
‘I wish I got his phone number. I actually hugged him. I said thank you so much. You saved my daughter,’ Austin said.
In retrospect, Olivia’s mother said her and her family were too close to the horse at the time. Knowing what she knows now, she said they wouldn’t have been there to begin with.