Pregnant East Bay mother details Florida airboat crash after breaking tailbone
By J.R. Stone
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PITTSBURG, California (KGO) — A pregnant Bay Area mother among those injured in an airboat crash in the Florida Everglades is detailing the scary incident. Players and parents from an East Bay youth football league were on board.
“The boat was wrecked, water was coming in, kids were screaming, blood everywhere, mud everywhere,” Alssya Windom said.
Windom is describing the tense moments after the airboat she was on with her 7-year-old son and his travel MEGA Football & Cheer team out of Pittsburg, crashed last Friday in the Florida Everglades.
“This particular spot, it’s a curve and so there were two boats coming like this so the moment we saw it, it was too late to react, respond,” Windom said. “The last thing I remember seeing was the boat, like oh we’re going to crash.”
Windom was airlifted to the hospital with a 3-year-old and was one of at least 16 people hospitalized. Everyone survived.
“When I woke up children were in the water,” she said. “I believe we were knocked out for a few seconds, the other boat was on top of our boat it just took a while to kind of realize what was going on. Another mother on our team was floating in the water so we pulled her out, I started CPR on her, I then started to feel pain, I moved away and the captain of the boat took over and started performing CPR on her.”
Windom, who is seven months pregnant, now has a broken tailbone and is out of work as a flight attendant for the foreseeable future. Physically, her son AJ is OK, but he’s still a bit shaken up over what happened.
“He was screaming on the way back home thinking the plane was going to crash so he needs some therapy,” Windom said.
“It was scary at the same time as the other one. I would go on the boat, but not the airboat,” AJ said.
Windom says there were no safety warnings after getting on the boat and no seat belts.
“I remember the captain of the other boat saying ‘I never took this route before,’ he kept saying it repeatedly,” she said. “Just kind of made me upset that they don’t have safety protocols in place so this doesn’t happen. Everyone should have routes.”
ABC7 News has reached out to the airboat company with questions but has not yet heard back.
Alssya’s family has started a GoFundMe for her since she’ll be out of work with the broken tailbone.
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