Baby Jessica: How I Lost My $1.2M Trust Fund!
Nov. 28 2017, Updated 7:46 a.m. ET
Thirty years after she fell down a well and captured America’s attention, the now-grown-up Baby Jessica says she's lost the $1.2 million trust fund good-hearted Americans raised for her benefit.
Jessica McClure was just 18-months-old when she tumbled 22 feet down a well in her aunt’s Midland, Texas backyard back in 1987. Rescuers worked for more than 58 hours to free her, erupting with applause and tears when she was finally lifted out of the well.
These days, she is living a quiet life, still in Midland, as a special-education teacher’s aide and married mother of two.
The 1.2-million-dollar trust fund she received when she turned 25 is gone, she said, mainly due to the stock market crash of 2008.
“I think it’s amazing that people would come together like that to donate money to a child that was not theirs,” she told People magazine for their upcoming special People Icons: Heroes & Survivors. “I appreciate everything they did.”
McClure says she has no memory of her fall. She’s had 15 reconstructive surgeries over the years, most of them to save her right foot, which became gangrenous after being trapped above her head in the well.
McClure says she is still stopped in the streets to talk about her rescue, but her children, ages 9 and 7, only recently became interested in learning more about their mom’s history.
“We’re just normal, down to earth people,” she says. “I had God on my side that day. My life is a miracle.”
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