A Wisconsin man who was in the right place at the right time is responsible for saving a man who had fallen into freezing cold water.
Brody Chamberlin, 24, couldn’t sleep at around 5 a.m. Friday morning, so he went to buy cigarettes. When his car wouldn’t start, he decided to walk to the gas station to buy them. As he walked by the Kenosha Harbor, Chamberlin heard an odd noise.
“I kept hearing this noise,” Chamberlin recalls. “I kept hearing it, and I yelled ‘Is someone there?'”
He realized someone was calling for help but couldn’t pinpoint their location. Eventually, he saw a bike and ran to it. It was there he saw the man in the 34-degree water, holding onto a piece of ice. Police believe he fell off his bike by accident and fell into the water.
After Chamberlin failed to pull the 41-year old man out of the water on his own, he called 911, keeping them on speaker while he held onto the man until help arrived.
“I was talking to him and trying to get him to calm down,” Chamberlin explains. “I told him, ‘If you keep pulling, I’m going to end up in there with you.'”
After two police officers arrived, Chamberlin was holding the man to keep him afloat with the two officers clutching Chamberlin’s ankles to keep him from plunging into the icy water as well.
Eventually, firefighters arrived wearing cold water gear. They were able to get in the water and pull the man out before it was too late.
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By the time he was pulled out, the man’s body temperature had dropped to 85 degrees. They suspect he’d been in the water for nearly 30 minutes. Any longer and he would have been at risk for death because of hypothermia.
The man is still in the hospital but he was alert and responsive after firefighters pulled him out of the water. But there’s no way he would have survived if Chamberlin hadn’t been walking by.
“I don’t believe in guardian angels, but the starter went out on my car,” said Chamberlin. “If it hadn’t, I would have driven to the store instead of walked, and I never would have heard him.”