The 32-year-old diabetic crawled about a half-mile through chilly rain about 2 a.m. Monday to a barn. He was seeking help after flipping his sport utility vehicle into a field in this northern Butler County area.

Jeter was headed home after finishing a shift as a chef at an Oxford tavern when his 1994 GMC Jimmy flipped near Ohio 177.

By 7 a.m., a handful of Butler County sheriff's deputies and volunteers were searching for him after receiving a report of a vehicle abandoned in the field. Using megaphones, they yelled for him, to no avail. By 8:30 a.m., they were about to unleash search dogs.

Then a whistle and a yell pierced the wind. It was Jeter, signaling from an old storage barn where he had hunkered inside some hay to keep warm.

"I was just hoping and praying that somebody would help me and find me," Jeter recalled from his bed at Fort Hamilton Hospital, where he was in fair condition with a broken heel.

"I was looking at fighting a losing battle," he said of his trek through a cornfield, briar patch and creek to the barn. In the black of night, he spied a brightly burning security light outside the barn.

"It was raining pretty good. I was soaking wet. I was hurt. It was cold," he said. "My sugar was dropping. I am a diabetic, so my only means of protection was the barn."

As he waited to be rescued, he thought of his wife, Andrea. The couple married Sept. 18.

"I thought about how much I loved her - and I wasn't going to give up like that," he said.

The Butler County Sheriff's Office blamed the accident on driver inattention.

"I was fooling with the radio," Jeter said. "It was just commercials at the time, and I wanted to hear some music. I started drifting off (the road).... And the next thing you know, I'm in a field - flipped over."

Officials called Jeter fortunate. "Lucky we found him in a reasonable time to get medical attention," Detective Monte Meyer, sheriff's spokesman, said.

E-mail jedwards@enquirer.com