Officials are sharing their first interactions with the four siblings who were rescued last week after surviving 40 days in the Amazon following a plane crash.
Siblings Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, 13, Soleiny Jacobombaire Mucutuy, 9, Tien Ranoque Mucutuy, 4, and Cristin Ranoque Mucutuy, 11 months, were discovered alive on Friday — 40 days after the crash took place on May 1 — CNN previously reported.
Heartbreakingly, the first thing Tien told the search party was, “My mother is dead,” according to The Guardian,
Speaking with reporters on Sunday, Manuel Ranoque — the father of the two youngest children — said that according to the eldest sibling who survived, their mother, Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia, was alive for about four days after the plane crash.
Meanwhile Tien’s 13-year-old sister Lesly gave first responders a succinct answer when they first assessed her condition. “I’m hungry,” she told them, per The Guardian.
The four siblings are currently recovering in a Bogotá hospital, where they’re expected to remain for at least the next two weeks, according to the Associated Press.
The children were traveling with their mom and two other adults from the Amazonian village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare at the time of the plane crash, according to CBS. The outlet reported that the pilot declared an emergency after the single-engine failed in the aircraft, before falling off the radar.
In the moments that followed, Lesly helped save her baby sister.
“She saw the feet of her littlest sister where the three dead were and she pulled her out,” the children’s grandfather, Narciso Mucutuy, said in videos posted by the defense ministry, per The Guardian.
From their hospital beds, the children told authorities that although their mother initially survived the plane crash, she later told her children to leave her behind — and for Lesly to take care of her younger siblings, per the AP.
On Friday, the children were discovered about 3 miles away from the crashed plane. Authorities said they came close to finding the missing siblings numerous times, but that they had missed them.
Following their discovery, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said that the children were able to survive because of “their learning from indigenous families and their learning of living in the jungle,” per CNN.
The children, members of the Huitoto Indigenous group, ate Amazonian fruit such as Couma macrocarpa and Oenocarpus bacaba, they told their parents, per The Guardian.
Finding them was a “joy for the whole country” Petro said on social media.