Jeffrey Bush has been presumed dead after he was sucked into a gigantic 100-foot sinkhole that suddenly opened up beneath his bedroom, causing him to disappear more than eleven years ago.
At the time of the incident, the 37-year-old was asleep in bed at his home in Seffner, Florida.
On that fateful night of February 28, 2013, Jeffrey’s brother Jeremy was jolted awake by a loud crash. He rushed into Jeffrey’s room only to find a massive crater where his brother’s bed had been.
Thinking Jeffrey might have fallen into the sinkhole, Jeremy frantically climbed in, hoping to rescue him. Although he could hear his brother’s screams, Jeffrey was nowhere to be seen.
As the ground around Jeremy continued to collapse, a police officer from the Tampa Police Department urgently pulled him to safety. Sadly, Jeremy’s desperate attempts to save his brother were in vain.
“The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn’t care. I wanted to save my brother,” Jeremy shared with The Guardian back then. “But I just couldn’t do nothing.
“I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him.”
When emergency services arrived, the bedroom had completely collapsed. “There was no furniture. All he saw was a piece of the mattress sticking up,” a fire rescue spokeswoman said.
Advanced equipment was lowered into the sinkhole, but despite these efforts, no trace of Jeffrey was ever found. Experts estimated that while the sinkhole’s surface measured about 30 feet across, it expanded to 100 feet below the surface.
The brothers’ home was later demolished and filled with gravel.
The loss has been heart-wrenching for Jeremy and his family, including his wife and daughter, who were all at home when the sinkhole appeared.
“She keeps asking where her Uncle Jeff is,” Jeremy said about his daughter. “I lost everything. I work so hard to support my wife and kid and I lost everything.”
A few years after Jeffrey’s disappearance, the sinkhole re-emerged, prompting authorities to fence off the area as a safety measure.
In the year 2022 alone, approximately 27,000 sinkhole incidents were reported across the state of Florida, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection database.
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