O.C. Toddler Survives Fall From Cliff

Hospital officials and family have just one explanation: 18-month-old Grant Taylor Huff of Costa Mesa was blessed with some powerful luck when he survived a fall from an 80-foot cliff Sunday, plunging 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 modest ranch-style home.

The boy, who was in Oakley’s back yard with a 4-year-old cousin, fell after he crawled over a two-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, authorities and relatives said.

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 of Encinitas pulled Grant from the ocean, drenched and trembling, Jim Lindsay said.

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“I was maybe 40 yards away when I realized this was a small child, this was a small person,” Jim Lindsay said. “I got there as another wave was knocking him back. He was kneeling down, on all fours. He was trying to lift his head and waves were pulling him down.”

His wife, Maria, carried the boy up the steep stone steps leading from the beach, and neighbors wrapped him in blankets before Grant’s distraught mother arrived, along with deputies and paramedics, San Diego County Sheriff’s Sgt. Rob Morse said. Morse arrived at the scene as the wide-eyed little boy was being hustled into an ambulance.

Monday, Grant was released from the hospital after a good night’s sleep and a battery of X-rays that showed no injuries. He was all smiles, dressed in a two-piece jumper with yellow socks.

“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. “When I got to his room this morning, the youngster had not only eaten breakfast, his mother was playing some music and he was dancing on the floor in time with the rhythm.

“They went over everything twice because of the description of what had happened at the scene,” he said. “They couldn’t believe that there was virtually no injury.”

By Monday afternoon, Grant’s mother was fending off the media and caring for the chubby child with long dark curls.

“He’s fine today, very active, running around like crazy,” said his mother, Joanne Taylor, 31, of Costa Mesa as she prepared to rock her boy to sleep for an afternoon nap. “But he’s still a little nervous, and he won’t go out in the back yard.”

Taylor said Grant suffered little more than a bruise on his arm and another on his side. For a number of hours after the 10:15 a.m. accident, she added, he held his head as if he had a headache.

Grant’s miraculous fortune may have been aided by the momentum he picked up as he rolled down the first 30 feet of the slope that precede the sheer 50-foot drop, Oakley said.

At the foot of the cliff is a 15-foot seawall the boy would have landed on had he fallen straight down. Instead, he landed about five feet from the wall, in the surf at high tide.

“Thank God he was rolling so fast that he fell on the water side of the seawall,” said Margaret Oakley, who was too shaken to drive herself home from the hospital Sunday. The Oakleys now plan to install a six-foot plexiglass wall around their entire yard.

The boy and his mother were visiting Oakley and her new husband, David, at the couple’s home, which is perched on a ridge 80 feet above the surf in this city’s Leucadia section. Erosion has gnawed at the cliffs over the years, leaving residential properties dangerously close to the precipice.

Oakley said the morning started peacefully. Grant was playing in the back yard with Oakley’s other grandchild, 4-year-old Kimberly.

“The last time we saw him, he was standing on the [fence] post,” Oakley said. “We were talking leisurely and my granddaughter came in and said, ‘I can’t find Grant. I can hear him but I can’t see him.’ ”

Oakley and Taylor ran out and hopped the side retaining wall, a shorter masonry wall easier for a toddler to climb than the rear slat fence. Grant was nowhere to be seen.

“Logic told me there was no other place he could be but on the bluff, but my brain wouldn’t let me believe it,” Oakley said. “I yelled for my daughter to get back from the bluff, so she wouldn’t go over too.”

Oakley ran to the home of a pediatrician next door, but he wasn’t home. She called 911 as her daughter bolted for the stone steps to the beach.

On the beach below, the scene was surreal. The Lindsays came to stroll near the surf with their Siberian huskies for the first time since their own baby boy was born three weeks ago, Jim Lindsay said. The infant was at home with his great-grandmother.

The tide was up, and only a lone fisherman stood between them and the end of the beach about 250 yards away.

“We got a third of the way down and Maria said, ‘Jim, something just rolled off the bluff,’ ” Jim Lindsay said. “I looked and thought maybe a pelican had landed. Then I saw there was something moving there, something irregular.”

The tide was washing in and out, exposing Grant and then covering him with water. Maria thought it was a baby seal. Jim took off running.

Jim Lindsay picked up Grant and handed the boy to his wife. Grant was drenched and was shaking, but he did not appear badly injured. He was able to move his head and use his arms and legs, Jim Lindsay said.

“He clung on to Maria. She wasn’t letting this kid go,” he said.

Authorities said that if Jim Lindsay had not arrived at that moment, Grant easily could have drowned.

When sheriff’s deputies called the Lindsays late Sunday to say Grant was uninjured, the couple bought a bottle of champagne, then paid a visit Monday to Grant, the miracle toddler they will think of forever as “the beautiful bouncing baby boy.”

“We had a nice reunion. We looked at the bluff and all got scared together,” Jim Lindsay said. “It was great to see Grant looking so good, climbing around the furniture. This is too big a miracle. This kid is so lucky, in more ways than one.”

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Times staff writer Thao Hua contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Close Call

An 18-month-old Costa Mesa boy fell from an 80-foot San Diego County cliff into the surf. The toddler, Grant Taylor Huff, was uninjured. This is what happened:

1. Huff, playing in his grandmother’s back yard, gets through a small gap in the wall.

2. He rolls down a 30-foot long slope and falls 50 feet off the cliff edge.

3. Huff lands in the surf below, narrowly missing a 15-foot high concrete wall.

4. Jim and Maria Lindsay, walking their dog 100 yards away, see what they think is a baby seal in the surf.

5. They find Huff struggling in the water. After pulling him out, they wrap him in jackets.

Paramedics take him to the hospital. Tests reveal no serious injuries.

Drawing not to scale

A Close Call, DAVID PUCKETT / Los Angeles Times