Audrey Marie Santo (December 19, 1983 – April 14, 2007), often referred to as Little Audrey, was an American girl from Worcester, Massachusetts through whom miracles were purported to have happened after she suffered severe brain damage in a near-drowning accident. Accident Audrey Santo was the youngest of four children born to Linda and Steve Santo. On August 9, 1987, three-year-old Audrey was playing outside in the driveway with her four-year-old brother Stephen. When Stephen came inside alone, Linda and her twelve-year-old son, Matthew, went to look for Audrey and found her face down in the backyard swimming pool. Matthew dove in and pulled Audrey from the pool, and she was rushed to the hospital. Audrey remained in a coma for about three weeks, in intensive care. According to Linda Santo, doctors recommended she be placed in an institution, but the family wanted her at home. In November, almost four months following the accident, Audrey was brought home. Audrey's father Steve Santo left the family during the weeks after the accident. He returned years later, only to leave again. Health Once she returned home, Audrey required 24-hour nursing care, provided by her family and a team of nurses provided by the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. She breathed through a ventilator and was on a feeding tube for sustenance, purportedly taking only communion wafers by mouth. Audrey's family contended that she was in a state called akinetic mutism — unable to speak and with limited movement, but fully alert and awake. However, Edward Kaye, the pediatric neurologist who treated her for eight years following the accident, told a Washington Post reporter that "the cell death is about as bad as you can get and still be alive. Her EEGs are profoundly abnormal. She has brain stem activity, but very, very little above the brain stem." A coma specialist, Ed Cooper, brought in by Linda Santo to help Audrey communicate with her hands, told CBS's 48 Hours in 1999, "If she can become consistent with movements of her hands, down for 'yes,' up for 'no,' or vice versa, it would be meaningful. Right now it's inconsistent." Međugorje The Santo family is Catholic. About a year after the accident, Linda took Audrey to Međugorje, which is a popular pilgrimage site in the then Yugoslavia, where the Virgin Mary is purported to have appeared periodically to six local Catholics since 1981. This was