Bailey Miller, 16, receives Life Saving Award from Cedar Falls Public Safety, Good Samaritan Youth Hero Award from MercyOne
By Anelia K. Dimitrova
You’ve probably never heard of Batwoman Bailey.
Until now, you’d have had no reason to.
But now you know.
So here she is – not an invincible cartoon superhuman, with extraordinary powers and a good heart, a pixel creation of an illustrator’s imagination or a figment of a writer’s daydreaming.
That’s not her.
She’s a flesh-and-blood Cedar Falls High School student, who saved a life last July, when she happened to be at the right place at the right moment and also had the guts, the know-how and the composure to help a man trapped in his vehicle as it was sinking in a neighborhood lake.
Her name is Bailey Miller.
Bailey’s brave, brainy and beautiful, on the inside and out, as her life-saving efforts show. Her courage and the speed with which she acted in the emergency she was thrust into earned her the Batwoman moniker, among friends and family, and two local honors. On March 7, 2025, she was recognized with the Life Saving Award, given out by the Cedar Falls Public Safety Department. Then on March 27, 2025, she received the Heroes Among Us Good Samaritan Youth Hero Award, from MercyOne, to standing applause.
Bailey’s just 16 years old. She loves karate, spends time with family outdoors and sacrifices to help others in time of need. Among other things, she’s the youngest member of the Cedar Valley Lodge, the local chapter of the Order of the Odd Fellows in town, where her dad, Matt, has served for years. She volunteered to help with charitable causes there, then, as soon as she was of age, she joined because she’s drawn to causes that require empathy and compassion and “giving to others whenever the opportunity arises.”
That’s exactly what Bailey did on July 24, 2024. The details of what happened that night are listed in the police report. In it, Officer Carson Jensen, the first one to respond to the scene, says that he observed a “female subject, later to be identified as Bailey Miller, on a kayak by the vehicle.”
What the police record also makes clear is that by the time help arrived, about six minutes after the 911 call, Bailey had the situation under control, and, while the responders were at the scene, she single handedly delivered the driver from the car just seconds before it sank to the bottom of the pond.
“Everything could have gone so differently,” Bailey says, “and it’s a miracle that it all worked out the way it did.”
What happened
It all unfolded in minutes on a quiet and otherwise uneventful night, in a Cedar Falls neighborhood, right next to a gem of a lake, where neighbors are friends and nature is family.
It was around 11:30 p.m. and Bailey and her sister, Bristol, just 13 at the time, had just finished watching Grey’s Anatomy, chatting the night away, bonding over the aches and pains of teenage hearts.
A summer night like many others.
Except it wasn’t to be.
As Bristol headed upstairs to settle for the night, Bailey lingered on the porch for a few more minutes.
Then, she spotted car lights in a driveway across the pond. One second, the vehicle appeared to be in the driveway, the next it was in the lake.
Bristol, who had returned to the porch, quickly sniffed out trouble.
Fearing for the life of the driver, both sisters jumped to investigate.
Meanwhile, a whole set of events were put in motion by others who saw the car in the pond. A woman had called 911 and watchers were starting to fret how to help with their bare hands.
But Bailey knew nothing about that at the moment. The urgency she felt sent a rush of adrenaline through her veins.
In passing, she noted that the commotion on the shore did not disturb her parents or the dogs upstairs.
Over coffee at Cup of Joe recently, along with her mother, Keri, and Bristol, Bailey talks about the rescue in a measured tone.
With her sunglasses propped on her head, she is relaxed and quick with a smile as if she were here to catch up with a friend about casual goings on, not be interviewed about her act of bravery.
She’s had months to think about the events of that night and is still processing some of the scenes, but the public recognition that comes with the awards has brought back the rawness of the moment.
As she tells the story from her perspective, Bailey occasionally pauses and Bristol chimes in, to fill in a detail or two. There’s so much their minds are still trying to grasp.
Listening to her daughters, Keri tears up, then sips her coffee. She’s proud of her two girls, but she also knows it could have ended differently.
It took Bailey months to tell her friends about her life-saving actions, her mother says. Her parents, by contrast, kept telling everyone.
It’s a good story with a good ending.
But living through it at the time, Bailey was racing against the unknown. As watchers paced up and down the shore in hysterical helplessness, yelling and crying as a driver’s life hung in the balance in the pond, Bailey kept her cool through the hurdles she encountered in the rescue.
She’s quick to admit that she may be indecisive when it comes to picking a caffeinated drink from the menu, but when danger lurks, she switches to survival mode in a split second.
“I grew up in a family where we’re very prepared for those things,” Bailey says.
Nothing could have prepared her for what happened next.
Rushing to help the driver in the sinking car
In retrospect, Bailey’s actions seem to follow a logical pattern.
The sequence of what she did that night, from that moment on, and the forceful determination with which she put her will and her wit to work in tandem, in a chaotic and life-threatening situation, is hard to imagine or capture in words.
It’s not that the words are inadequate to describe the moment, it’s that they can’t hold the charge of living in it, especially when a surreal drama unfolds.
Here is what Bailey remembers doing that night:
Pushing quickly aside an impulse to wake her parents first, Bailey ran to the scene, shoeless and eager to help, her sister following closely behind in her night robe.
Running along the lake’s north end dam, Bailey kept slipping and sliding on the ground, wet from the stubborn rainfall earlier that day. But she kept going until she got as close as she could to the sinking car.
The front hood was already under water, and she thought the driver was running out of time.
Bailey knew that eventually, the weight of the engine, and the forces in the water, would drag the car down.
In the pressure of the moment, Bailey remembered a video her dad had shared with her a couple of weeks ago on how to survive being trapped in a water-bound vehicle.
At the time, it seemed like a random helpful tip her father had found on social media, but on that fateful night, it served a purpose, Bailey says.
“This is absolutely wild,” she says, reflecting on how she put that lesson to work in real life.
Quick-thinking actions before help arrives: “I got out there and I’m banging on the window”
Bailey’s brain was flashing red and she knew she needed to do something right away. She doubted help would come as fast as needed in the middle of the night.
Bristol begged her sister not to go into the lake, reasoning that the water could take her down, and offered to run back home and wake up their dad instead.
Bailey understood the risks.
“My first instinct was to dive in, but I wouldn’t be much help if I was in danger too,” Bailey says.
Bailey needed her kayak to reach the car safely. She grabbed her sister’s phone, so she could have some light as she ran back to the house, determined to get one of the kayaks and return.
The kayaks, which usually sit under the pine trees behind the house, happened to be in the driveway, which made them easy to reach in this dire time of need.
But pulling one out of the driveway was not easy because Bailey had been building a platform over the two kayaks to create “a nice little yacht” for herself.
Now that platform was holding the kayaks in place and they weren’t budging. Without further ado, she ran into the garage, grabbed the hedge trimmers to pry one out.
“I went out and ripped my raft apart and took all the ropes off, and then I threw this 60-pound panel over and it hit our grill and made a huge bang, but it didn’t wake up the dogs,” she recalls.
She grabbed three kid-sized life jackets from the garage, pushed the kayak into the water and put one of the life jackets around her shoulders. The second one was for the driver. She planned to use the third one to protect the driver from the shards of glass when she would break the vehicle’s back window.
As Bailey paddled to the sinking car, Bristol stayed on the shore, offering some comfort to a sobbing woman, hugging her, trying to soothe her and also yelling to her sister not to get too close to the car.
But Bailey did just that.
“I was banging on the window, with my fists. So I was trying to open the door. I was afraid I’d create a vacuum, but at least the door would be open,” she says.
There was no response. She kept trying to open the trunk or the side door when she finally heard a muffled scream.
“I was like, okay, he’s conscious,” she says.
Bailey looked for something handy to break the window.
“My first thought, wrap my fist in something and try and break it, maybe not my fist, maybe my heel, elbow. I think maybe in that state I could have generated enough power.”
Using a trooper’s baton, she breaks the window, pulls the driver out
It was then that Bailey heard the sirens and saw the lights.
Six Cedar Falls police officers, a state trooper, three fire engines and an ambulance reported to the scene of the emergency, with the first squad car showing up at 12:34 a.m.
Bailey knew there was only time for her to grab a tool of some sort to break the window, so she frantically paddled back to the shore.
“Give me a rock, a hammer, a head rest, like anything,” she kept thinking.
Then she locked eyes with one officer, Trooper Trevor Ambrose, who was on the dock.
“He’s my hero,” she says. “He told me later that I just looked like I had it under control, he thought I had it, so he hands me his baton and he says, ‘This is how you use it,’ and I was like, ‘I know.'”
Armed with the trooper’s baton, Bailey paddled back to the car as fast as she could. This time, she shouted to the driver to cover his face and took a swing.
The glass shattered on her first try.
“So I break it, and at this point, the car is like it’s a triangle, so all you can see is a portion of the back windshield, and then the rest of it’s under the water.”
She ran the baton around the edge to get rid of the glass.
“There was water inside the car, it was filling up,” she remembers.
“It was just dark. I’ll have to paint it some day. It’s so dark, it was so dark, really. There aren’t any lights on the pond. It was just a black hole inside the car. And then, this hand shoots out. So I grabbed it.”
Bailey aptly balanced the kayak at this moment, kneeling on one knee, and she finally pulled the man out.
She managed to put the life jacket on him, assessed him for injuries, and asked him to hold on to the handles on the front of her kayak, while she started paddling slowly toward the shore.
That’s when she saw the paddle boat, with three rescuers on board, headed in her direction.
“That’s a sight that’ll stay in my mind,” she says.
She met them halfway.
“I turned around and the car was gone, just some bubbles, he probably had 15 seconds left.”
A life-saving moment is also a life-changing moment
Looking back on that intense night, Bailey is candid in her reflection.
It took her a long time to get back on the pond without being on edge.
It was a life-saving moment for the driver, and a life-changing moment for her.
Overnight, literally, she moved from being the kid next door to becoming Batwoman Bailey, as the neighbors now call the courageous teen who knows how to come to the rescue.
“Finding out that I really have it within is something that’s really changed my outlook, my future,” she says.
That future may well have been charted by the courage she displayed that night.
“I think you’re either born with that ability or you’re not,” she says.
A suggestion later made by one of the responders, Cedar Falls Police Officer Brooke Heuer, that Bailey consider a profession as a firefighter or a police officer, sounds like a good path to her right now.
“And then, in terms of personal growth, I think for me, my career choices, I’ve always kind of wanted to be a teacher,” she says.
“It kind of runs in the family, so, I think it’s interesting because I’ve always wondered, you always wonder, if you are capable of saving a life.
“I feel like a lot of people dream of being that hero. I dream of, you know, when’s the time that someone on the street needs help and I’m the one that’s there to help them.”
At the awards ceremony, Bailey learned that it took just 11 minutes between the 911 call and the time the driver was on a stretcher.
“It feels like eternity for me,” she says. “The fact that that much can happen and all of it is crazy. Eleven minutes.
“I think about it a lot, too, like 11 minutes you could spend scrolling on your phone. I could be saving a life. I could be doing so many other things. I hold myself to a very high standard in my life. It changed my priorities, like I’m a life saver.”