‘I think I’m going to die’: ‘Hand-me-down’ earbuds save teen’s life after 80m fall

Landing on his back with a thud, teenager Jake McCollum didn’t fancy his survival chances after falling 80 metres from a mountain in a Queensland national park.

“I remember thinking it was probably all over for me,” he said.

The 18-year-old was “pretty banged up” after plummeting from Mount Walsh, 90 kilometres inland from Maryborough, during his first solo bushwalk.

Jake McCollum said the LifeFlight helicopter “went back and forth for quite a while” before he was winched to safety.Credit: LifeFlight

He suffered a fractured spine, broken ribs, internal bleeding and a “decent” head laceration.

Crawling over to his backpack, McCollum activated a personal identification beacon and hoped for the best.

The mobile phone he had used to take a photo of the view from the mountain’s summit just moments earlier was smashed.

Yet half an hour after his fall, McCollum heard a call coming through his “hand-me-down” AirPods.

By the time he had crawled over to collect his Bluetooth headphones, he had missed 10 calls.

Thankfully, it rang again and McCollum tapped on his AirPods to answer. It was his mum.

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“I heard really, really faintly, ‘Mum, I’m hurt really bad’,” Rachel McCollum said on Friday as she recalled the November incident.

“It’s probably the worst news you can ever hear.

“I don’t know how many times he said during that phone call, ‘I think I’m going to die’.”

His mother stayed on the phone while father Tim relayed messages to authorities searching for their son as they completed the 90-minute drive from their Bundaberg home to the mountain.

McCollum’s position was difficult to locate – he had not used the main trail and his beacon was “bouncing off boulders”, confusing the co-ordinates.

Then the AirPods’ batteries died.

But McCollum pressed his ears against his damaged phone and could somehow hear his parents’ faint voices as a rescue helicopter approached.

“When the helicopter did arrive, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is great’, but then it went right past me,” he said.

“I was talking through the phone and saying, ‘It’s gone past me, it’s gone past me!’ – it was back and forth for quite a while.”

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Five hours after McCollum’s fall, LifeFlight aircrew officer Shayne White finally saw the teenager’s legs in the thick canopy.

It took an hour for the rescue team to stabilise him before he was stretchered over to a winch site and flown to hospital.

Barely two months later, the McCollums enjoyed an emotional reunion with the rescue team.

“He’s a very lucky boy, with a good outcome,” White said on Friday.

“If his AirPods and phone weren’t working, we might not have found him.”

AAP

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