Hospital workers now fear Alyssa Jo Lommel, a Duluth college student, could lose one or both her hands.
She was wearing just blue jeans, Ugg boots, a sweater and light jacket. But she had on no gloves when a passerby found her around 9:30 a.m. Saturday.
Her hands were three times their normal size — and may have to be amputated due to the severe frostbite and hypothermic conditions she endured.
The college sophomore was nearly frozen to death, police said in a report.
“It’s very much a wait-and-see thing at the moment,” the teen’s mother, Teri Lommel, told the St. Cloud Times. “It’s going to take some time to determine what’s going to happen. We are hopeful that her body will heal itself.”
Cops say the college student was dropped off outside her home around midnight Friday after about six hours of drinking.
Her friends told police she “wasn’t falling down drunk” when they dropped Lommel off, but they did not see her enter her home.
Tracks in the snow showed that Lommel, rather than go up to her own house, went next door, the Duluth News Tribune reports. She reportedly entered an unheated backyard garage before trying to enter a locked car.
The report shows that Lommel walked down a dead-end street before returning to her neighbor’s house, climbing a railing and apparently passing out on the front steps.
She reportedly had keys to her own house. Her cellphone was found on the back steps of the home of her neighbors, members of a college basketball team who were out of town for the weekend.
Fire officials found the teen “stiff as a board and extremely cold” when they responded to the scene Saturday, CBS Minnesota reports. The wind chill reportedly reached -36 degrees that night.
Ellen Johnson told the Associated Press she spotted Lommel on the front stoop as she drove by Saturday morning.
"I was surprised nobody had seen her," Johnson said. "It was hard to miss her."
Johnson said she’d helped trauma patients before but had “never seen anyone like that.”
