Video shows horrifying sinkhole that screaming man was sucked into from his bedroom and hasn't been seen since
Chilling footage shows the sheer depth of a huge sinkhole which opened up in the middle of the night and sucked a sleeping man into it.
Jeff Bush disappeared from his home in Seffner, Florida, in March 2013, after the ground suddenly caved in.
The 37-year-old was asleep in bed when the 100-foot sinkhole opened up, giving him only a matter of seconds to let out a series of chilling screams before it suddenly fell silent.
His brother, Jeremy, was woken by Jeff 'hollering' his name as well as all of the subsequent noise, but by the time he'd reached the bedroom, his sibling had vanished.
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During a chat with CNN shortly after the tragedy, Jeremy explained: "Everything was gone. My brother’s bed, my brother’s dresser, my brother’s TV. My brother was gone."
He then grabbed a shovel and frantically began trying to dig through the rubble in an attempt to reach Jeff.
But police hauled him out of the sinkhole when they arrived, warning that the floor of the one-story home was still collapsing.
"I couldn’t get him out," Jeremy sobbed. "I tried so hard. I tried everything I could. I could swear I heard him calling out."
Jeremy managed to escape the property safely alongside four others, including his two-year-old daughter Hannah and his partner Rachel Whicker.
The family initially hoped that rescuers would be able to locate Jeff somewhere in the sinkhole, but sadly, this was not the case.
Despite sending high-tech equipment into the vast cavity which had opened up underneath the home, there was no trace of him found.
In April 2013, the month after Jeff disappeared, officials in Hillsborough County released the footage which emergency services had obtained from inside the sinkhole.
A tiny camera was attached to a pole before being slipped through Jeff's bedroom window to record the video.
When the footage was filmed, engineers told ABC News that the sides of the sinkhole had become 'fiercely steep after initially being more tiered'.
This meant that it would be an 'incredibly unstable' structure and therefore extremely 'risky for anyone to jump in and try and save Jeff'.
His sister-in-law Rachel said she plans to show her daughter, Hannah, the clip when she is older to explain what happened to her beloved uncle.
She said: "We heard Jeff scream. We ran down the hallway, I flicked the light on, we opened up the door and all we seen was a big old hole. Jeff was gone.
"I can't believe it happened, honestly. All I can tell her [Hannah] is that he is in heaven and that he loves her."
Rescue teams called off operations after it was deemed that the ground and the house remained a danger, before the house was later demolished.
However, that didn't spell the end of the sinkhole, as it opened up on at least three more occasions in the ten-years after Jeff's disappearance.
Hillsborough County filled the hole following the tragedy and purchased the pad next to it so that no one else would suffer a similar fate, but it continued to reopen a number of times.
After it happened again in July 2023, Jeremy revealed that he often visits the site to feel close to Jeff.
"Ain’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about my brother," he told WFTS. "Stuff that happened in that house that night, and hearing my brother yell and scream for me to help him, I hear it all the time.
"When I'm not working, I try to come by here and visit him because it's the only place I got to visit him," Jeremy went on.
"It's his last resting place. It's hard seeing the hole back open again."
The state of Florida is prone to sinkholes due to the limestone underneath the soil, which can melt in the rain.
According to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection database, there were about 27,000 reported sinkhole incidents across the state in 2022.
Topics: Environment, Health, US News, Home
Olivia Burke