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Kids turned saviors

Three children team up, lift shed roof off their father

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Three of Matt Gannaway’s four children, (back row) Ethan, 13, Addy, 9, and Payton, 11, along with some friends, were pictured under the same roof that, minutes later, would collapse on Gannaway at his mother’s home in Marshalltown Tuesday morning.

“I started talking to the ambulance people … I told them ‘My dad just got crushed by a shed.'”

It wasn’t the way 9-year-old Addy Gannaway or her brother Ethan, 13, and sister Payton, 9, thought their Tuesday morning visit to their grandma’s house was going to go.

“It knocked me out, unconscious,” said Matt Gannaway, who suffered a broken scapula and several cuts and bruises when a shed roof collapsed on top of him as his children watched. If not for them, he may not have survived the accident.

“My two girls, my 9-year-old and my 11-year-old, and my 13-year-old boy actually lifted up the roof, which was several hundred pounds, and drug me out,” Gannaway said. “I came to shortly after that, right when paramedics and the fire department were getting there.”

The family had gone to from their home outside Montour to Gannaway’s mother’s house in Marshalltown to help her move out. Together, they began to deconstruct an old 8 x14 wood shed she had by her house.

Then disaster struck.

Addy recalled being terrified when the roof fell on her dad. She ran over and immediately started trying to lift the structure while Ethan called 911. They eventually switched roles, with Ethan doing the lifting and Addy the calling. The young man said he sensed danger “after I saw it (the roof) fall, and it started leaning toward him (Gannaway).”

The children coordinated quickly and efficiently.

“I took the phone and I told the ambulance about it,” Addy said.

Together, the kids, veins flooded with adrenaline, managed to lift the roof just enough for Payton to scramble to her father and drag him to safety.

“We were exhausted,” Ethan said of the immediate aftermath. “I was sad, anxious and nervous because he was kind of in and out of consignees.”

When he came to, Gannaway said the first sensation was pain.

“I was in so much pain, I just didn’t even know what to do,” he said. “I thought my back was broken and I was bleeding a lot out of my head.”

After being rushed to the hospital, Matt was told by his doctor just how lucky he was, despite the broken scapula. It easily could have been his neck or back that gave way.

“I’m just absolutely so proud of them,” Gannaway said of his kids, now his saviors. “[When] I heard that my kids were the ones that saved me, I couldn’t have had a prouder moment.”

Within hours of the ordeal, Gannaway watched Payton and Addy as they played their scheduled softball games Tuesday evening. “The least I could do is try to support them a little bit,” he said.

Ethan said he and his siblings were consumed by one goal in that awful moment: saving their father’s life.

“It was instinct, I was trying to help my dad,” he said.

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