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WINTER GARDEN, Fla. – Newly released body camera video shows the frantic efforts by first responders to save a couple who were struck by lightning while walking along the West Orange Trail in Winter Garden.<\/p>\n
Warning: The body camera video contains graphic images, some of which have been blurred.<\/p>\n
Officers find couple critically injured <\/p>\n
Local perspective:<\/p>\n
The footage shows Winter Garden police officers arriving to find Aaron Walenga lying on the ground with a severe head injury, groaning in pain and struggling to respond.<\/p>\n
Officer: “Okay, stay right there, buddy… Can you talk? … Fire Department is coming, just keep talking to me.”<\/p>\n
Nearby, his wife, Clare Walenga, was also suffering from a head injury and was initially unresponsive.<\/p>\n
A witness told officers she appeared critically injured immediately after the strike.<\/p>\n
“She was blue,” a Good Samaritan said.<\/p>\n
Witnesses describe powerful lightning strike <\/p>\n
Witnesses told police the lightning strike was so loud they initially believed it had hit a nearby fence.<\/p>\n
The Walengas were two of three people struck by lightning in Central Florida within a week.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, 20-year-old Matthew Jenkins died after an apparent lightning strike while walking on a trail in Celebration. His death marked Florida’s sixth lightning-related fatality of the year.<\/p>\n
Florida remains a lightning hotspot <\/p>\n
The National Weather Service says Florida is one of the nation’s most lightning-prone states and warns that every thunderstorm poses a potentially deadly threat.”We need to recognize lightning as a threat because it doesn’t matter whether it’s the first, the only or the last lightning strike. Every cloud-to-ground lightning strike is capable of injuring or killing someone,” National Weather Service meteorologist Will Ulrich said.<\/p>\n
The National Weather Service reminds residents that if they can hear thunder, they are close enough to be struck by lightning and should seek shelter indoors immediately.<\/p>\n
The Source: This story was written based on information shared by the Winter Garden Police Department, the National Weather Service, and previous reporting by FOX 35 News.<\/p>\n
Orange County News<\/a>Winter Garden<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WINTER GARDEN, Fla. – Newly released body camera video shows the frantic efforts by first responders to save…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[47,115,1335,139,141,140,628,25863],"class_list":["post-397691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-fl","tag-news","tag-orange-county","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-us","tag-winter-garden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}