Idaho teen amputee reveals extent of injuries after car crash left her dangling on power line 30 feet in the air and how accident gave her a new outlook on life
An Idaho teen described the horrid moments when her broken leg kept her alive after she was thrown 30 feet into the air onto a power line in a horrifying car crash.
Kennedy Littledike, then 16, drove to a mountain near her house with two friends to watch the sunset on May 22, 2021, to try to get her mind off her recent breakup.
As the three drove back to her home, Littledike began crying behind the wheel and the car swerved toward the left side of the road.
“I can’t remember what made me start crying again,” Littledike told Inside Edition. “Everyone’s like, ‘You should have pulled over.’ Yeah, I would’ve. But it was so abrupt and happened so quickly.”
The sobbing teen had overcorrected too far and hit a telephone pole before flipping and rolling over while all three friends were ejected from the vehicle.
Littledike was the first one thrown out of the car and landed on a power line 30 feet in the air.
The teen said she snapped her femur on the wire and revealed her gruesome injuries.
“In the process of getting thrown, my arm was actually torn off, was hanging on by the skin on my back, and then my femur was snapped over the wire and hanging in front of my face,” she told the outlet.
The unfortunate landing position turned out to be the reason she wasn’t immediately killed in the crash.
“A lot of people ask, ‘How did you not bleed out?’ Well, the main artery in my leg was pinched off by the power line, and then the main artery in my arm was actually cauterized when I got electrocuted.”
The teen, now 19, says she dangled from the wire for an hour waiting to be rescued as blood started running down her face.
“I remember I was drowning in my blood because it was running from my leg, it was running from my arm, and it was going in my nose, and I was just wiping it out because it was literally drowning me,” Littledike recalled.
Littledike felt “helpless” as she hung suspended over the ground and was unable to get herself down.
“I didn’t know what to do in that situation,” she said. “I felt so helpless. And I remember I started to cry, and I remember telling myself, ‘If you cry, you’re done,’ like ‘This is the end for you.’”
“My second memory was getting a FaceTime call. I didn’t have my phone, obviously, it was in the field, but I had imagined a call and it was a picture of God, the picture of him reaching his hand through the water.
When firefighters arrived to help Littledike, she remembered one of her rescuers grabbing her leg as her “lifeless body” fell onto the stretcher.
“They put the tourniquet on and had to take my bone back off the wire. And they said I screamed. And then, once I hit the stretcher, it was silent.”
The teen, unsure if she had thought it or said it aloud to the first responders, believed she was dying after they pulled her down.
“I can’t remember if I said it in my mind or actually said it, but I remember feeling like saying, ‘Thank you for trying to save my life, but this is it for me.’ And I remember closing my eyes.”
Littledike was flown to the University of Utah, where she underwent 21 surgeries for her broken femur, a broken humerus bone, a broken clavicle and a brachial plexus injury.
The extent of her injury forced doctors to amputate her leg, not once but five times.
“They tried taking it at my knee, through my knee. My leg just kept rotting because the bone was broken so high up,” Littledike said. “Every other day, they were going in and taking more leg. And to go under surgery, over and over and over, to get more and more leg cut off. They’d finally just cut it off at the bone.”
Since the accident, Littledike has had a more positive outlook on life, and she is sharing her story as a public speaker on social media, with over 382,000 followers on TikTok.
“Before my accident, I struggled with mental health. I wanted to commit suicide,” she told Inside Edition. “I did not ever really plan my future because I didn’t think there was going to be one. I wasn’t happy.”
“I look back and I’m like, ‘Wow, you’re pathetic.’ Because now, look at me. I’m in a whole different, harder situation, but I’m so much happier.”
