18-Month-Old Survives 80-Foot Plunge Into Surf

Hospital officials and family have just one explanation: 18-month-old Grant Taylor Huff was blessed with something far more powerful than luck when he fell from an 80-foot cliff Sunday and plunged unhurt into the churning surf below.

“The Lord has something else in mind for this child,” his grandmother, 62-year-old Margaret Oakley, said Monday as the curly haired toddler played in the living room of her ranch-style home.

The toddler, who was in Oakley’s back yard with a 4-year-old cousin, fell after he crawled over a 2-foot retaining wall onto a neighbor’s property and slipped, apparently rolling and bouncing down the steep slope for 30 feet before he was launched into the surf another 50 feet below.

In keeping with Grant’s remarkable luck, a couple walking their dogs on the beach below noticed something fall from the sky and found him struggling in the surf as the high tide washed over him, authorities said.

Jim and Maria Lindsay pulled Grant from the surf.

“I would say he was accompanied by a guardian angel on the way down,” Mark Morelli, spokesman for Children’s Hospital in San Diego, said Monday.