Patrick Burke heard a little girl’s screams for her daddy on a dark, snowy night last winter, and the daddy in him responded without hesitation.
The Wauconda salesman had never wanted to follow in the footsteps of his firefighter dad and brother, but he jumped into an icy lake to rescue a 9-year-old and her father, whose all-terrain vehicle crashed through ice.
Onlookers put their lives on the line in a similar fashion last week. Surging floodwaters led two men to pull a 13-year-old to safety in the swollen Des Plaines River, and two Chesterton, Ind., men drowned in a drainage ditch trying to save a 10-year-old boy.
Burke said the events unfolded so quickly last New Year’s Eve that he didn’t stop to think. Instinct commanded him to act.
“I’m not that type of heroic person,” said Burke, 38. “If you had heard that girl’s voice … it was my daughter’s voice.”
Experts say it makes sense that everyday heroes don’t stop and think about whether to help, given the character traits they tend to share.
Those who put themselves forth in an emergency generally have a positive outlook on life and draw personal satisfaction from helping others, said Larry Walker, director of the graduate psychology department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
“It’s part of their identity,” Walker said. “It’s not as if they have to muster up the will to act courageously; it’s just who they are.”
Walker’s research holds true for Stephanie Harper, who helped save the life of former Glenview Police Chief David Kelly nearly a decade ago.
“I’ve never sat around and thought, ‘I want to make a difference,’ but I’m one of the people who think, ‘If I can make a difference, I will do it,'” said Harper, 26, of Chicago.
While a New Trier High School student, she had been walking to school in Winnetka with a friend when they spotted Kelly’s unmarked squad car. It began to roll as Harper reached inside, shifted the blue Crown Victoria into park and checked Kelly’s pulse. She checked his mouth and made sure his airway was clear before using Kelly’s cell phone to call 911.
“The irony is that we saved the life of a man who saved lives every day,” she said.
Troubled waters
Last Monday, Orlando Mazzulla, 44, was standing by the Des Plaines River to check whether the water was receding when he saw the 13-year-old jump in and flounder. He took off his shoes, emptied his pockets and went in to save the boy.
“I mean, what are you going to do?” said Mazzulla of Des Plaines. “It wasn’t even a thinking thing — all of a sudden I’m in the water, and I’m thinking, ‘I just did a really stupid thing.'”
Mazzulla hasn’t had much time to process his good deed, but if the experiences hold true from other everyday heroes — regular citizens who have no special training in handling emergencies — he may reflect on his decision to act for years to come. And he may gain a deeper appreciation of the danger he faced.
Patrick Policape, 45, of Skokie still replays the events of two years ago when he crawled through his neighbors’ burning house and dragged an unconscious man out by his leg. The man survived. As he relives the rescue, Policape marvels at the surreal quality of it all.
“It was just unbelievable,” he said. “Because when you’re right there, you think, ‘What am I doing? Am I really doing this?'”
Yet Policape said he doesn’t consider himself a hero.
“It just so happens that was the circumstance at the time. Somebody had to do something,” he said.
Walker said that response is common among the many heroes he has studied.
“Pretty much everyone denied being a hero,” Walker said. “They claimed anyone in their situation would have done the same thing. They’re wrong, but that’s how they viewed their action.”
A case in point is Matt Bozdech, 44, a trucker from Effingham who pulled to the side of Interstate Highway 70 in April 2004 to rescue the driver of a semitrailer truck involved in a fiery wreck. He knows dozens of cars passed by the collision without stopping. Yet he credits a higher power, not himself.
He found the driver slumped unconscious at the wheel, and the doors jammed shut. The truck was on fire and the tires were exploding.
“I didn’t think about it that much at the time. I was concentrating on getting him out of there,” Bozdech said. “I walked to the front of the truck and just prayed, ‘OK, God, we need your help getting him out of here.'”
The driver finally awakened and Bozdech helped pull him out the window, legs first.
Right place — for a reason
Several heroes interviewed for this story said they believe they were at the specific spot of the emergency for a reason.
Sylva Leitner, 83, of Skokie pulled an unconscious woman who was suffering from diabetic shock from the bottom of her condominium’s swimming pool, then held her head above water until emergency responders arrived.
“God put me in that particular pool at that particular time,” Leitner said. After firefighters took over and she returned to her condominium, she said, “I walked and cried for about an hour. I was so unnerved and so relieved they took care of her.”
The aftereffects of his heroism still linger for Peotone banker Jim Petreikis, 40. Two years ago in Will County, he helped save a group of teenagers from a horrific crash in which their car was broadsided by a minivan, trapping some of them inside. He and four other men happened to be in the area and helped free the teens from the fiery wreckage.
Petreikis said he thinks about the accident once a month or so, especially when he sees kids riding in a car or when his own teenage daughter heads out of the house.
“It’s not like it was a life-changing event where I go to church nine days a week, but it makes me think more about safety,” Petreikis said. “I realize how short life is.”
He says he keeps in touch with some of the parents of the teens whose lives he saved. One mother recognized him at the bowling alley last winter and gave him a big hug.
“It stays with you for a while,” Burke said of his rescue nine months ago of the Glendale Heights man and daughter who fell through the ice. “That first night, I didn’t sleep a wink.” For months afterward he said he felt his hands tingle, as if they were still cold. He drew closer to his Catholic faith, unable to shake the nagging question of why he had felt compelled to shovel on New Year’s Eve during a blizzard, and what could have happened had he gone inside a minute earlier.
“Maybe you were there for a reason,” he said.
Mazzulla, a father of three, said he’s not sure whether he would ever again throw caution to the wind to save another. But on Monday, he said, he just did what he thought was right.
“There was a child in the water,” Mazzulla said. “You would hope that somebody would do that for your own kids.”
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