Determined Dad Walks Nearly 30 Miles Through Hurricane Debris to Be at Daughter’s Wedding (Exclusive)
“I did what any dad would do,” David Jones tells PEOPLE
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David Jones with his daughter Elizabeth on her wedding day" fifu-data-src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/TgsM8QrRJb6AxCJnUgGffg--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTY0MA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/people_218/22108af62bcc1344702de4d1b47dfff7">
Stella Carter/stellar photography
David Jones with his daughter Elizabeth on her wedding day
Determined to walk his daughter down the aisle, David Jones trekked nearly 30 miles through Hurricane Helene storm debris to make it to the wedding on time.
“I did what any dad would do,” Jones, a 64-year-old business performance excellence coach, tells PEOPLE.
Jones weathered the hurricane at home in Boiling Springs, S.C. After getting the generator going on Friday, Sept. 27, he started the process of heading over the mountain to get to the spot where his daughter was scheduled to get married the following day, a trip that normally takes just two hours by car.
After seven hours, he finally made it across the state line into Tennessee. The interstate was completely shut down and he saw cars and trucks stopped as law enforcement officers told them they could not go any further.
“I went up to the incident commander and I said, ‘Sir, I need to get to Johnson City,’ He said, ‘Well, I’m sorry. You can’t. The bridges are out. Nobody can get through,’ ” Jones recalls.
He asked about the back roads. The officer told him those roads were all washed away. Plus there was only one bridge left standing, and with questions about its stability, Jones was told he simply couldn’t drive.
It was now 2 a.m., and his daughter was getting married at 11 a.m. So Jones decided to walk.
“I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle,” he remembers telling the officer.
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He left his Ford Explorer parked at the bottom of an exit ramp, grabbing his backpack, shaving kit and a windbreaker. Then, in the dark of night, the marathon runner started walking.
“It was pitch black, no streetlights, no nothing. The devastation was beyond description, sections of roads washed out,” he says.
Along the way, he passed several state troopers, who all tried to stop him and told him to go back to his car. “I would explain, ‘My daughter’s getting married at 11 o’clock, and I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle,’” he says. “There was debris everywhere on the road and beside the road.”
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David Jones and his daughter Elizabeth on her wedding day
Around 3 a.m., he saw a bulldozer and a backhoe clearing the road, surrounded by piles of debris that were about seven-feet high. It was “just a tangled mess,” he says.
“I thought I would try and go around it, and I stepped down into mud that was like quicksand and I was quickly up to my knees,” he says.
Fortunately, he was eventually able to get his right leg out, but then his shoe came off, so he had to dig in the mud to get it. “I knew I couldn’t make it without shoes,” he says.
After freeing his other leg, he began to crawl on his hands and knees under and over the debris and back to solid land.
“Hollywood could not have done a better description,” he says of the damage caused by the hurricane. “The devastation is beyond description.”
By the time he got south of Erwin, the roads were looking better — and word of his travels had spread.
“A state trooper pulled up alongside of me and rolled his window down and said, ‘Sir, are you the one that’s trying to get to your daughter’s wedding?’ I chuckled and said, ‘Yes, sir, I am. How did you know?,’ ” Jones recalls. “He said, ‘We’re all talking about you – they all said you’re determined.’ ”
That officer offered him a ride into downtown, but after that, it was back to walking.
As cars whizzed past, he grabbed a red reflector from the side of the road to carry as he walked in the dark, and he started to worry that he might be late for the wedding.
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About six miles down the road a truck pulled over, and as luck would have it, the driver was a man Jones used to work with when he was an engineer at Texas instruments.
The man drove him the last eight miles to his home. “In all, it was just shy of 27 miles – 10 miles by car and 17 by foot,” Jones says.
At the man’s Johnson City home, there was no power, but there was water, so Jones was able to change into a spare suit, and make it to St Mary’s Church to walk his daughter Elizabeth down the aisle on time.
“It meant the world,” he says. “Every dad wants to walk his daughters down the aisle.”
Stella Carter/stellar photography
David Jones and daughter Elizabeth
There was no power at the church, so it was a candlelight ceremony. At the wedding reception, he gave a toast — and presented the bride and groom, now Elizabeth and Daniel Marquez, with the reflector he carried on his journey.
“I told the story of the 27 miles and how if there was any way, I was going to find it. Lots of tears were shed by me and others,” he says. “I said, ‘I want you to keep this reflector as a reminder to always protect each other, even in your darkest hours. That’s when it’s needed the most, as it did for me, and for you both to continue to be a reflection of God’s goodness, because you are such good people.’ ”
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