WEBER COUNTY, Utah — Kasen Richter and Noah Leavitt went on an adventure to catch frogs Wednesday afternoon.
“I’m an outdoor man," said Richter. "I like doing stuff like that."
Richter’s legs got tired while trudging through the mud, so he stopped to take a break. Within minutes he realized his legs were stuck.
“I thought it was just like slightly-deep mud," he recalled. "I just looked at it, I was like, 'Oh, it's not really that deep,' because it almost looked super shallow."
Slowly, he started sinking — mud up to his chest.
“I'm like, ‘Are you sure you're stuck, like, are you not like playing around?'" Noah Leavitt, Richter's friend, remembered asking. "He's just like, ‘No, I'm actually stuck.’”
Richter guessed he was stuck in the mud for 20 minutes before help arrived, and he realized it was more than just a sticky situation: it was a scary one.
“It was cold," he said. "I knew that if I were in there for longer, I probably would have gone under.”
The property owners, whose mud Richter was stuck in, called the Weber County Fire Department. It didn’t take long for the first responders to pull the teen out and give him a bit of a hard time for trespassing on private property.
“First question was like, ‘Have you caught any frogs out here?,'" Richter said. "And then they're like, ’How many frogs you catch?’ I didn't catch any, sadly.”
Although he didn’t take home any frogs with him that day, Richter did learn an important lesson.
“I want to definitely tell everybody not to do stuff like this because it's very, very unsafe," he said. "And if I were not helped by these kind people, then I don't know what would happen. I probably could be gone.”
