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Scott Dixon was scrambling down a rocky embankment toward the dark water below when he heard a girl screaming.
“Help,” the voice said, “Help, there’s people trapped in the car!”
Still in his button-down shirt and without time to ditch his long pants or shoes, Dixon jumped into the water and swam toward the lights of a now-submerged pickup truck.
It was Friday night around 10 p.m. Dixon, his wife and their 11-year-old daughter were driving home from a Christmas party when they first saw the pickup truck. It was just ahead of them, going northbound on Studebaker Road at around 35 mph when it started veering into oncoming traffic.
Dixon, a battalion chief with the Long Beach Fire Department’s Marine Safety Division, slowed down, anticipating the worst.
As the truck’s driver tried to correct their trajectory, Dixon said, the vehicle plowed into a traffic signal just north of Seventh Street. It took a sharp left, driving directly into the adjacent flood control channel.
Dixon, who has worked as a lifeguard in Long Beach for three decades, said that’s when his instincts took over: “I watched it go in and parked the car right there and just went across the street and jumped in.”
While he was in the channel, Dixon knew his wife, Kendra, was calling 911. His job was to make sure anyone in the truck was still alive when rescue crews arrived.
When Dixon reached the teenage girl screaming for help, she wrapped her arms and legs around his body and clung desperately as he swam her the 10 yards or so from the submerged truck to the edge of the channel.
“She wouldn’t let go of me,” Dixon said, “Screaming, ‘Help me. Don’t let go of me!’”
She managed to tell Dixon that there were two more people in the car, and he gently pushed her away, toward another bystander waiting on the shore.
When he reached the submerged truck again, a second teenage girl popped up to the surface. Dixon quickly ferried her to the rocks and went back for the remaining passenger: her grandpa, she told Dixon.
Halfway between the truck and the shore, Dixon said he saw the man, probably in his 70s, floating face-up in the water, not moving.
Worried about a spinal injury, Dixon said he handled the man gingerly and with precautions as he started pulling him toward the shore. Thankfully, the man was awake, Dixon said, conscious and coherent, but clearly shaken. He kept saying, “Just give me a minute,” Dixon said.
Unable to lift the larger man onto the rocks himself but knowing he was probably going into shock in the cold water, Dixon was able to coax him out.
“And he slowly crawled up the rocks a little bit, and right then two fire personnel showed up,” Dixon said.
With “the cavalry” on the scene, Dixon said, he gave a quick statement to police and headed back to the family car where Kendra and 11-year-old Berklee had been praying.
After “a big wet hug,” they bundled him in the blankets they keep in the back of the car for soccer games, turned up the heater and headed home. Dixon had work the next day and Berklee needed to be up early for a soccer game.
After the fact, police said they don’t know yet why the pickup truck’s driver crashed, but they don’t suspect speed or impaired driving.
Nobody in the truck was seriously hurt, with just some pain and minor injuries that were checked out at a local hospital, according to the Long Beach Police Department.
Driving home, Dixon said, there was a moment when the reality hit him and his family: How much worse would the crash have been if they hadn’t been driving on Studebaker at that moment to see exactly where the truck landed in the water?
Alluding to his faith, Dixon said he doesn’t believe it was a coincidence.
“Somebody else put me here at this time,” he said.