A 13-year-old boy who fell down a sewer system on Sunday and was miraculously rescued after being trapped for more than 12 hours in two feet of toxic sewage says that he prayed to God throughout the ordeal.

“I was praying to God to help me and to not die,” Jesse Hernandez, 13, told KNBC-TV.

At around 4:30 p.m., Hernandez was spending time with some of his cousins during a family outing at Griffith Park in Los Angeles when they went through an opening in a fence and began playing on a concrete structure. Suddenly, a plank that had been covering a portal to the sewage system gave way.

“I was playing, and I didn’t see that it was a little piece of wood, and I stepped on it, and I just fell down,” he recalled to CBSLA.

The boy fell as much as 25 feet down the portal into the sewage pipeline, which was only four feet in diameter and contained sewage water traveling at an estimated 15 mph. Continue reading >>>