Jamie Lynn Spears Reveals Daughter’s Near-Death Experience Led Her to Faith
By Movieguide® Contributor
ZOEY 101 star Jamie Lynn Spears opened up about how one of the scariest moments she’s experienced as a mother led her to faith.
“I almost lost my oldest daughter…She drowned, and we couldn’t save her,” Spears said on an episode of I’M A CELEBRITY…GET ME OUT OF HERE, per PEOPLE.
“In February 2017, [Spears’ daughter] Maddie crashed a Polaris ATV into a pond at her stepdad Jamie Watson’s family’s home in Louisiana, according to a statement by Sheriff Daniel Edwards at the time. The then-8-year-old was steering the popular off-road vehicle to avoid running over a drainage ditch,” USAToday reported of the accident.
“We tried really hard. She was trapped under a little side-by-side that we ride around our pond,” she continued. “My father-in-law, my mother-in-law, me and my husband, we run to jump in to save her, and you kind of — in that moment, you think, ‘This is not real. She’s going to pop up, this isn’t real.”
“I could feel her arm, and I’m jerking it. I couldn’t get her up because it’s a pretty heavy machine. In that moment, you think, you know, logically she’s been underwater too long,” Spears added.
“Nobody can live if they’ve been underwater this long. You logically are thinking these things,” she recalled. “Then you hear the sirens coming. Thank God my mother-in-law, first thing she did was call 911. [Maddie] was caught in the safety netting. So when they got there, she was not alive. They took her from me and they intubated her.”
“They airlifted her. She’s hooked up on life support, breathing machines and all that…they come in, [bring] a priest to read her her last rites, and when they did, her body physically sat up,” Spears remembered.
“Her spirit responded to it for whatever reason. She got better and better every day and walked out of the hospital. [She] has no repercussions. So that’s when I became Catholic. For about five minutes I thought I’d lost my daughter and then I was given the miracle of having her back,” she said.
She previously told PEOPLE how the accident changed her perspective on life.
“You have a lot more gratitude,” Spears explained. “That was a miracle. That should be heard. There’s a lot of dark things in this world today, and I think that putting something out there like that, that is so wonderful, is something that should be shared.”
Movieguide® previously reported on Spears:
After being freed from the ATV, Maddie was taken to the hospital. She suffered no brain damage and is completely recovered…
She went on to say that the family was “very blessed.”
“Things like that don’t just happen for no reason,” Spears continued. “That’s how we discuss it now. It’s our miracle anniversary, not our accident anniversary. And both Maddie and I are so grateful.”
Spears reflected on the accident further in a recent Instagram post.
“Maybe, it’s just a little reminder to remain faithful through the good times and the bad times,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “I mean, I had nothing when I thought I lost my baby girl, so my faith was literally all I had left to cling to. I thank God everyday for the extraordinary medical professionals, all the prayer warriors, and the countless angels in heaven, and on earth who made our miracle possible.”
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