sunny skyz · 2 hours ago

Deputy Carries Baby Through Floodwaters, but Says Viral Photo Tells Only Part of the Story

A photograph of a sheriff's deputy carrying an infant through floodwaters went viral - but Deputy Brayton Thurber was quick to redirect the attention it brought him. He had noticed the young mother and her oxygen-dependent baby about a week before the flooding struck Junction Creek Mobile Home Park in Colorado, quietly filing them away as "a high priority because of its location and because of its precious cargo." When the water rose, he carried the child while the mother and her brother gathered the critical medical supplies, and neighbors, volunteers, and first responders moved through the chaos around them. "I think that that photo is a perfect, perfect distillation of everything that everybody's been doing in this community," Thurber said - and he meant it as a description of hundreds of people, not one. The image captured a single moment; what it points toward is something harder to photograph: the instinct, when things get dangerous, to reach for one another.