Feisty Grandma, 83, Is True Survivor

Who nearly killed Tillie Tooter? That’s the question state police officials sought to answer as they hunted Friday for the driver who rear-ended the 83-year-old grandmother, sending her car somersaulting over a highway guardrail and into a swampy ravine.

There, pinned in the wreckage and hidden from passers-by, the feisty Tooter spent three days--catching rainwater to stay alive and preparing, finally, to face death.

“I screamed and I blew my horn and I did everything that I possibly could to attract attention,” she said Friday from the hospital where she is being treated for minor injuries. “I prayed, I screamed, I raged, I cursed, waiting to get a little help, hoping somebody would hear me screaming.”

Ultimately, Tooter said, “I made my peace with God”--and wrote a farewell note to her granddaughter, Lori Simms. “You feel like there’s nothing left for you in the world,” she said, near tears. “I made my peace . . . and told myself I was dying.”

But Tooter was spared on Tuesday when a teenager picking up litter along the roadside spotted her car lodged in a thicket of mangrove trees about 40 feet beneath an interstate overpass. She had left her home in a Pembroke Pines retirement village just before 3 a.m. Saturday for the 15-mile drive to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport to pick up Simms and her boyfriend, who were flying in from New Jersey.

When Tooter did not arrive, Simms reported her missing, and police launched a search.

But for three days, Tooter lay trapped in her mangled car, not seriously injured but unable to crawl out. “It was quite maddening,” she said of her frustration and the waves of hunger and stinging insects that tormented her. “It was painful. I was bitten all over my body.”

For nourishment, Tooter said, she had one cough drop, one piece of peppermint candy and a stick of gum--which she broke into pieces and rationed. “And when I ran out of the few things I had, I sucked on a button to produce saliva in my mouth,” the retired bookkeeper explained. “I had heard that many years ago.”

To collect rainwater, Tooter stuck a steering wheel cover out the window. She sopped up the water with a pair of golf socks that she kept over the gear-shift knob, and then she sucked on the socks.

To pass the time, the red-haired grandmother said she belted out musical Golden Oldies. “I sang songs from the ‘40s and ‘50s, the good ones,” she said.

After two days, with hopes fading, Tooter said she also tried mental telepathy to contact her daughter and a sister in California. “I have this connection with my sister. I was saying, ‘Think, concentrate, come back, come here,’ ” Tooter said. “I knew they were looking for me.

“But my biggest regret was that I could not see my family again,” she said.

Tooter was hauled up from the ravine by Fort Lauderdale fire rescue emergency teams using a basket and a crane.

Also pulled from the swamp was her totaled Toyota, which police said showed signs of having been hit from behind.

Florida Highway Patrol officers said they planned to question a 21-year-old Hollywood, Fla., man who reported that he had smashed into the retaining wall about the same time that Tooter’s car plunged into the ravine. A black Camaro with extensive front-end damage was found on the highway about a mile from where Tooter’s car left the road. It has been impounded.

Tooter is expected to be released within a day or two from Broward General Medical Center, where she was being treated for dehydration, insect bites and facial bruises.

She will then return to her home and neighbors at Century Village, where she is known as “a wonderful, gutsy person,” according to close friend Charlotte Zusmer, 79.

And Tooter has no plans to quit driving, especially after being given a new $16,500 Toyota by a Deerfield Beach distributorship.

“I am a survivor,” Tooter said Friday. “I have been fighting for 83 years. I come from Brooklyn, N.Y. And if you don’t learn to survive there, you are not going to make it anyplace.”