As she drove home Sunday, Peg Ransom saw an incredible sight: a tearful toddler clutching for dear life to the rear of a speeding truck.
There in front of her was a 2-year-old girl in a pink jacket, her feet on the bumper and her hands clasped hard on a delivery truck’s rear door handle.
Speeding along Illinois Highway 176 at about 50 m.p.h., the driver, the girl’s father, was apparently oblivious that the terrified child was clinging to his truck.
“At first it looked strange,” said Ransom, 57, a public relations consultant from Libertyville. “I saw something: blue and pink. Then when I got closer I saw her blond hair. It was incredible. She was so little. She was just looking at me.”
Screaming and leaning out the window, the woman tried desperately to get the driver’s attention.
“I was just honking and waving so hard I was afraid I might swerve off the road,” she said.
Ransom continued to follow the truck when it turned south on Fairfield Road, worrying that if she pulled alongside him, she might startle the driver and cause him to swerve, throwing the child off the end of his truck. But she didn’t want to pull off the road either, Ransom said, because somebody had to alert the truck’s driver.
“I knew I was running a risk,” she said. “I was trying to do my best for this little girl.”
Minutes later about 4:50 p.m., Dick McGill, 47, was northbound on Fairfield Road. He was on his way to buy a spark plug for his snowmobile. He passed the white delivery truck and saw the little girl glued to the back. Then he saw Ransom honking and waving her arms.
“I knew something was wrong,” said McGill, a 26-year veteran of the Wauconda Fire Department. “I just couldn’t believe it. I thought I might be seeing something.”
McGill made a U-turn and joined the pursuit.
Fairfield, a curvy road, allows few opportunities to pass, McGill said. So he and Ransom pursued the white truck for several miles, both of them frantically honking and screaming to get the driver’s attention.
Finally, as they approached the intersection of Old McHenry Road in Hawthorn Woods, McGill pulled into the northbound lanes alongside the truck and motioned for the driver to stop.
Michael Hoary stopped his truck and stepped out to find his 2-year-old daughter, Allyson, still hanging on the back.
“There was an angel holding on to her,” Pamela Hoary, Allyson’s mother, said Monday. “We’re still in shock that this child held on for 5 1/2 miles.”
Michael Hoary, of Wauconda, was unavailable for comment Monday. But his wife recalled the events leading to her daughter’s traumatic odyssey.
Michael Hoary was heading out to his truck Sunday when his wife told him he had a phone call just before he left for Chicago on business, she said. That’s apparently when Allyson slipped out the front door and climbed onto the back of the truck.
After her husband left, Pamela Hoary said, she couldn’t find her daughter and figured she was hiding or in the woods outside. When five minutes passed, she called the police and reported her missing.
Moments later, police called and told her about Allyson’s high-speed brush with death.
“She was hysterical,” she said. “She wanted to go to Chicago with her dad. She’d been talking about it all day.”
At the Wauconda fire station Monday, McGill and Ransom were praised as heroes by Fire Chief David Dato, who said he would recommend both for a village honor. McGill and Ransom also had an emotional reunion Monday with Allyson, who came to the station with her family.
“She’s a beautiful girl, so serene,” said Ransom, who said she cried when she got home Sunday night and was barely able to sleep.
“For a 2 1/2 year-old girl to have the presence of mind to hang on, and the strength, is incredible,” she said.
