AN American presumed dead after he was found “frozen solid” on the side of a road has defied doctors to make a miraculous recovery.

    Justin Smith was discovered lying unconscious in a foot of snow, his eyes open and body frozen rigid after walking home from a night out with friends, by his distraught father last year.

    Found without a pulse and not breathing, Don Smith was sure his son had died in the freezing temperature of -20 degree Celsius in February 2015.

    “I held him and sobbed, ‘Justin, don’t leave me,’” he said. “He was so cold, frozen. He was like a block of concrete.”

    He even called his wife in tears to tell her “Justin’s dead.”

    But when medical crews and even the coroner came out, they refused to pronounce the 26-year-old dead while his body was that cold.

    “The coroner was on scene. The state police were on scene. They were doing essentially a death investigation,” said Dr. Gerald Coleman, an emergency department physician at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Hazleton.

    Justin was airlifted out in the middle of a snowstorm to the hospital where teams performed CPR for two hours.

    Tim Hickey, a flight nurse, recalled thinking during the trip, “People in this situation don’t survive.”

    He was then transferred to Lehigh Valley Hospital Cedar Crest near Allentown where doctors used an ECMO machine to warm up Justin’s blood.

    “We knew we needed a big, big miracle,” Justin’s mom Sissy Smith said.

    Incredibly, as Justin’s body temperature began to warm, his heart started beating again.

    But doctors still had no idea whether he would survive and if he did, whether he would have suffered life-changing brain damage while unconscious.

    Neurologists found no signs of brain activity in initial scans as Justin lay in a coma.

    John Castaldo, MD, admitted he had “little hope” for the patient but within a few days tests began to show his brain was making a recovery.

    “We were jubilant,” Castaldo said in a Lehigh Valley statement. “We believed there was a miracle unfolding in front of us.”

    It would still be weeks before Justin finally woke up and became fully conscious of his surroundings.(SD-Agencies)