Determined Dad Treks Nearly 30 Miles Through Hurricane Debris to Be at Daughter's Wedding

Mar. 15, 2025

David Jones with his daughter Elizabeth on her wedding day.Photo:Stella Carter/stellar photography

Stella Carter/stellar photography

“I did what any dad would do,” Jones, a 64-year-oldbusiness performance excellence coach, tells PEOPLE.

After seven hours, he finally made it across the state line into Tennessee. The interstate was completely shut down and he saw cars and trucks stopped as law enforcement officers told them they could not go any further.

“I went up to the incident commander and I said, ‘Sir, I need to get to Johnson City.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m sorry. You can’t. The bridges are out. Nobody can get through,’ ” Jones recalls.

He asked about the back roads. The officer told him those roads were all washed away. Plus there was only one bridge left standing, and with questions about its stability, Jones was told he simply couldn’t drive.

It was now 2 a.m., and his daughter was getting married at 11 a.m. So Jones decided to walk.

“I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle,” he remembers telling the officer.

He left his Ford Explorer parked at the bottom of an exit ramp, grabbing his backpack, shaving kit and a windbreaker. Then, in the dark of night, the marathon runner started walking.

“It was pitch black, no streetlights, no nothing. The devastation was beyond description, sections of roads washed out,” he says.

Along the way, he passed several state troopers, who all tried to stop him and told him to go back to his car. “I would explain, ‘My daughter’s getting married at 11 o’clock, and I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle,’” he says.  “There was debris everywhere on the road and beside the road."

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David Jones and his daughter Elizabeth on her wedding day.Stella Carter/stellar photography

“I thought I would try and go around it, and I stepped down into mud that was like quicksand and I was quickly up to my knees,” he says.

Fortunately, he was eventually able to get his right leg out, but then his shoe came off, so he had to dig in the mud to get it. “I knew I couldn’t make it without shoes,” he says.

After freeing his other leg, he began to crawl on his hands and knees under and over the debris and back to solid land.

By the time he got south of Erwin, the roads were looking better — and word of his travels had spread

“A state trooper pulled up alongside of me and rolled his window down and said, ‘Sir, are you the one that’s trying to get to your daughter’s wedding?’ I chuckled and said, ‘Yes, sir, I am. How did you know?,’ " Jones recalls. “He said, ‘We’re all talking about you – they all said you’re determined.’ ”

That officer offered him a ride into downtown, but after that, it was back to walking.

As cars whizzed past, he grabbed a red reflector from the side of the road to carry as he walked in the dark, and he started to worry that he might be late for the wedding.

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About six miles down the road a truck pulled over, and as luck would have it, the driver was a man Jones used to work with when he was an engineer at Texas Instruments.

At the man’s Johnson City home, there was no power but there was water, so Jones was able to change into a spare suit, and make it to St Mary’s Church to walk his daughter Elizabeth down the aisle on time.

“It meant the world,” he says. “Every dad wants to walk his daughters down the aisle.”

David Jones and daughter Elizabeth.Stella Carter/stellar photography

There was no power at the church, so it was a candlelight ceremony. At the wedding reception, he gave a toast — and presented the bride and groom, now Elizabeth and Daniel Marquez, with the reflector he carried on his journey.

source: people.com