Mother, Daughter Frozen Yards From Safety

After her car slid into a half-frozen creek, Pamela Jean Wagner and her 3-year-old daughter escaped out the driver’s window and began walking in the dark to a farmhouse for help.

Soaking wet with the temperature at 8 degrees, they walked about a mile for more than three hours and got within yards of the farmhouse when more water blocked their way. They collapsed and died in a field, frozen and exhausted.

“To make it as far as she did, she’s a very strong woman,” said a sobbing Jennifer Tschakert, who owns a bar where Wagner worked part time.

Wagner, 29 and three months pregnant, had a cellular phone, but it had apparently been soaked in the accident Tuesday in the usually calm Whiskey Creek.

Searchers in helicopters spotted the bodies the next day, 200 yards from the farmhouse, after the silver car was found in the creek, along with footprints leading out of it.

Wagner had already made it 40 miles from Fargo, N.D., where she worked as a secretary, had picked up her daughter Victoria from day care and gone grocery shopping when she stopped at the Barley Bin bar on her way home.

“I was the last one to give Tori a hug before they walked out the door,” Tschakert said.

After leaving the bar, she got to within about a mile of home when her Chevrolet Celebrity hit a patch of ice from the flooded creek as she drove up a hill. The ice broke and carried the car away.

As they tried to walk to help, mother and daughter found their path blocked by a different portion of Whiskey Creek. They were found with their clothes frozen solid.

Sheriff Tom Matejka said the woman apparently carried the girl some of the way. “‘She just walked and fell to the ground, couldn’t make it anymore.”