Everyone thought he was already dead when they found him covered in snow—no pulse, no blood pressure and with a frozen body that had already turned blue and resembled "a block of concrete."
But thanks to the faith of one doctor, 26-year-old Justin Smith of Pennsylvania miraculously came out alive from his icy grave.
Smith had gone out for drinks with friends the night before, only to be found the next day on the side of the road, mostly covered in snow in the freezing -4 F temperatures, WND reported.
"Seeing him in that condition, there was no hope," said Justin's father, Don, who found his son on the side of a road in Allentown, Pennsylvania. "I thought, 'He's, you know, dead.'"
Don even called his wife in tears to tell her "Justin's dead," recalling an incident that occurred in February 2015, the Daily Mail reported.
Emergency personnel arrived on the scene, but they, too could not detect any vital signs in the man who had been in sub-zero temperatures for approximately 12 hours at the time.
All hope seemed lost, but Dr. Gerald Coleman, an emergency department physician at Lehigh Valley Hospital, felt that Justin was still alive.
"My clinical thought is very simple: you have to be warm to be dead," Coleman said. "Something inside me just said, I need to give this person a chance."
Coleman instructed paramedics to begin CPR on Justin. They went on to perform compressions on Justin's frozen body for two hours. It didn't seem to be working at first since his body remained frozen.
"We knew we needed a big, big miracle," Justin's mom, Sissy Smith, told WNEP.
Thanks to the power of prayer, that "big, big miracle" came when Justin was brought to the hospital.
Doctors hooked him up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine to warm and supply oxygen to his blood. Justin warmed up and his heart began to beat on its own.
Doctors worried about Justin's brain, which had been deprived of oxygen for many hours. Typically, brain cells begin to die after just a few minutes without oxygen.
Neurologists found no signs of brain activity in initial scans as Justin lay in a coma.
Dr. John Castaldo admitted he had "little hope" for the patient. However, after a few days, tests began to show his brain was making a recovery.
"We were jubilant," Castaldo said. "We believed there was a miracle unfolding in front of us."
A few weeks later, Justin finally woke up and became fully conscious of his surroundings. He did end up losing his toes and two pinkies to frostbite because of the incident.
Today, almost a year later, the "frozen man" is back to his happy-go-lucky self. Justin has returned to school at Penn State to finish his degree in psychology.
"When you look at the science of what happened to Justin, it was really hard to imagine that anyone on Earth could survive this," said Castaldo said.
"Things happen for a reason. This just kind of renewed the faith of why I do what I do every day," added Coleman.
