Joe Little, 28, was fishing alone early on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, on the jetty at Hammond Marina, a run of massive, uneven rock built into the mouth of the Columbia River west of Astoria. He was sitting on a boulder he had sat on several times before, his grandmother, Kelly Simonson, later told KPTV. This time it began to move. "He said that he felt it start to move and he put his feet down to stop it, but the boulder was huge, and he slipped down and it just went over him," Simonson said. The Coast Guard has warned that waves and changing tides can shift the enormous rocks that make up jetties and breakwaters.
When it settled, Little was pinned underneath it, below the line the high tide reaches, and he could not free himself. The Bluetooth earbuds he was wearing — the kind that loop around the neck, his mother, Mindy Little, told KOIN — had stayed connected through the fall. So he spoke aloud and asked Siri to call 911.
Just after 7 a.m., Warrenton police and fire crews were dispatched to the jetty. Then came the part nobody had planned for: they could not find him.
The jetty is long, and a man lying under a rock on it is very small. A dispatcher stayed on the line with Little, relaying what he said to the crews working their way out along the stone.
Sgt. Dylan McCoy of the Warrenton Police Department, the first officer on scene, told KPTV that responders began sounding their vehicle horns while the dispatcher asked Little whether he could hear a horn close by. His answers narrowed the search to a stretch of the jetty.
Going out on foot to comb the rest of it was its own hazard. The rock is uneven and unstable, with gaps that drop away between boulders. "We would have had to search by hand or by foot and then that puts the first responders at risk," Warrenton Police Chief Mathew Workman said.
Instead, McCoy launched a drone. Three minutes after it went up, according to his account to KPTV, the camera found Little. Only part of his upper body and his feet were visible from above; the rest of him was under the boulder. Warrenton police later released the drone imagery.
"He was under a very, very, very large boulder, and so just a miracle that he survived and that he's alive," Workman said. He was also lying below the high-tide waterline, on a jetty at the mouth of a river that drains into the Pacific. "If the tide would have came in, he would have drowned," Workman said.
Warrenton Fire crews did not try to move the thing that was on top of him. McCoy told KPTV they worked instead on everything around and beneath him. "They removed some of the smaller ones and that allowed them to move him from underneath the extremely large boulder which had trapped him," McCoy said.
Freeing him was only half the problem. Carrying an injured man back over that terrain on a stretcher was not something anyone wanted to attempt. At 7:38 a.m., local fire crews had already asked Coast Guard Sector Columbia River for help. An MH-60 Jayhawk aircrew from Coast Guard Air Station Astoria arrived over the jetty at 8:51 a.m., lowered a litter, hoisted Little off the rocks and flew him back to the air station, where he was handed to waiting EMS at 9:55 a.m. From the first dispatch to that handoff was roughly three hours.
"Today showcased how the Coast Guard and local agencies work together to save lives," said Chief Petty Officer Patrick Toomey, the command duty officer at Sector Columbia River.
Mindy Little was in Seattle when the call reached her. "It was panic. We couldn't get home fast enough," she said.
Her son was taken first to Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, then to Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland. He had severe facial injuries, including a broken jaw, along with a skull fracture and multiple facial fractures. He was critically injured but responsive. "His face got smashed. He's almost unrecognizable," his mother said.
On Sunday she said he slept through most of the day, opening his eyes now and then and getting out a few words. His injuries keep him from speaking clearly. By midweek she told KOIN he was getting stronger. KPTV reported he was scheduled for facial reconstruction surgery on Thursday, Oct. 1, an operation expected to take about eight hours.
His family set up an online fundraiser for Joe and his wife, Sabrina. The Coast Guard, in the days after the rescue, repeated its standing advice that people stay off jetties and breakwaters, where the rock can move without warning.
"It's a miracle that my son is alive," Mindy Little said. "I can't thank everybody enough for my son's life — for saving him."
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