Thomas MacMillan Photo
From an upstairs window, Ian and Carolyn Christmann saw cops on the far bank of the river below, where a woman was frantically trying to stay afloat.
Ian’s wife turned to him. “They may need a boat. You should take yours.”
The couple remembered a tragedy several years ago, when neighbors gathered on the shore as one boy drowned and others were stranded in the Quinnipiac River before a boat could get out to them.
Ian Christmann (pictured) wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again.
He jumped in his kayak and helped cops and firefighters save the life of a pregnant woman who had fled from an attacker by jumping in the river.
Christmann’s kayak trip was essential to the operation, said Sgt. Tony Zona of the police department. It was a “blessing,” said Sal Consiglio, one of the firefighters who helped pull the woman from the river Wednesday night.
The woman was the first of two people rescued that night. Emergency personnel fished out the woman’s alleged attacker from the water shortly after lifting her to safety. The man had assaulting her on the shore, then jumped in the water after her when she fled.
Thomas MacMillan Photo
On Friday, Christmann recounted what happened. The 34-year-old photographer has lived with his wife and two boys in a green house in Quinnipiac Avenue’s Historic District since 2002.
On Wednesday, he and his wife were saying goodbye to some dinner guests when they noticed a commotion on the far bank — flashing lights, shouting, and emergency vehicles.
As they watched for 10 minutes, they heard emergency responders yelling to someone in the water.
At the suggestion of his wife, a former volunteer firefighter, Christmann grabbed his blue Old Town kayak and carried it across the street to where he usually puts in behind his neighbor’s house. The river was dark. He found two cops there. He asked them if there was someone in the water.
“They said ‘Yes’ and I just went,” Christmann said.
As he pushed off, “I was just praying: God, help me get there,” he recalled.
Christmann is intimately familiar with the river, having completed a two-year photo project documenting 38 miles of the Quinnipiac. It was that project that led to him buying the kayak.
As he paddled out, he caught sight of something in the water, 40 or 50 feet from the far shore. “I saw just a head. A woman’s head.”
A lesson from a water rescue class during his time as a boy scout years ago came back to Christmann. People panic when they’re caught in the water. It was important that he stay calm and that he calm the woman down.
He pulled up alongside her.
“I said, ‘Grab the boat and relax,’” Christmann recalled. “She was saying, ‘I’m cold. I’m tired.’ She was exhausted.” The water must have been as cold as 50 degrees, Christmann said.
He paddled to the wall at the far bank, where firefighters and cops were waiting to pull the woman out. They thanked him and he paddled back home.
Christmann said he wasn’t doing anything his neighbors wouldn’t have done in his place. “This river’s like that. There would have been 12 others in front of me if they knew.”
“The only reason I went out is I remembered the drowning that took place years ago,” Christmann said. It was in 2006, three kids had gone for a late-night swim. One drowned and the other two were stranded in the middle of the river. “I was on the shore watching the boy cry out for what seemed to be a really long amount of time,” Christmann recalled. It seemed like it took 45 minutes for a boat to get out there, he said.
On Wednesday, it took him only a minute to paddle out to the woman.
“Where’d He Come From?”
Consiglio and Wargo.
Just as Christmann appeared in the middle of the river, firefighter Billy Wargo was preparing to plunge into the water after the woman. He’d already emptied his pockets of his cell phone and wallet, and donned a life vest. He figured he’d need to swim out to rescue the woman, as she was too far out to reach with a rope.
Moments earlier, Wargo had been working out with firefighter Consiglio in the basement of the Lombard Street station when the call came in for a water rescue. As it happened, it was the same shift of firefighters who responded to a rescue in East Rock the previous week. “Everybody who was there was here,” Consiglio said.
Wargo and Consiglio pulled up to the Brewery Square apartments at the foot of the Ferry Street Bridge, along with about 20 other firefighters. There were about 20 cops already on the scene. Officer Reggie McGlotten had been the first one on the scene to hear the screaming, said Sgt. Zona, Fair Haven’s top cop.
The river at that point is bounded by a stone wall topped with a green railing at that corner of the Quinnipiac River park. The water is some 6 or 8 feet down below the level of the park, with no way to climb up.
Police spotted the woman in the middle of the river and kept a light trained on her as she treaded water. They told her to swim diagonally to the shore, Zona said. But she wasn’t making any progress.
All of a sudden, “here comes a guy in a kayak from across the river,” Zona recalled. “It was like, oh my God, where’d he come from?”
“He was a blessing,” Consiglio said. “We were definitely going in the water” if Christmann hadn’t shown up.
When Christman paddled the woman over to the wall, several cops and firefighters — Zona, Wargo, and Officer Roger Kergaravat — had gone over the railing and stood on the edge of the wall. Consiglio and other responders held on to their legs as they lay down to lift the woman out.
Wargo had the easy job at that point, he recalled. He was just trying to get one person out of the water; the other guys were trying to make sure more people didn’t go in.
“I didn’t want to go into the drink.”
After they pulled the woman out, Consiglio wrapped her in his firefighter coat. She had lost some of her clothing and was cold and tired.
“We was just so exhausted,” Consiglio said. She tried to explain what had happened while he was “just holding her up.”
Eventually, EMTs treated the woman and sent her off to the hospital. “They packaged her up and we figured that’s it.”
Take Two
As Consiglio and Wargo started walking back to their engine, all of a sudden all the cops starting running back to the water’s edge.
“Officer Eddie DeJesus heard somebody yelling, ‘Help! Help! Help!’” Zona recalled. “We walked down the wall 50 to 75 yards. Here was this guy against the wall.”
It was the woman’s alleged attacker, still in the water and clinging to the wall.
Wargo and Consiglio raced back to the water’s edge and helped with a second rescue, this time with a rope. Wargo, Zona, and Officer Mike Rivera pulled the man out. He was so weak that he fell back into the water on the first attempt. He was too weak to hold on to the rope. Eventually, he was hauled out, ID’d by the woman, and placed in handcuffs.
Some time later, the emergency personnel learned that the woman is pregnant. “We didn’t rescue two people. We rescued three people,” Consiglio said.
“It’s one of those things where you feel really good about it after,” Zona said. “It just worked out really, really well.”
Awesome!
Thank you Ian. Its a month of heros in New Haven and you're one of them.
http://www.lifeboattea.co.uk/