Lio Cundiff sat on a bench at Belmont Harbor Wednesday afternoon, calling his aunt to wish her a happy belated birthday. He had time to kill before his shift as a server and barista at Oak and Honey, and decided to spend the unusually warm and windy day outside in Lincoln Park.
That’s when he heard the screams.
The 30-year-old said he looked up to see a woman chasing after a baby rolling toward the water in a stroller. The strong wind — the National Weather Service warned of winds between 20 to 30 mph with gusts up to 50 mph — blew the stroller away from her, Cundiff said, and she wasn’t going to catch it in time. The stroller went in the water, and Cundiff said the woman stood in shock.
“And so I just jumped in,” Cundiff said. “My only thing was, ‘You got to get this baby out of here.’ If she’s going down, I’ll go down with her, but the goal is to get us both up.”
Cundiff said he was treading water for at least three or four minutes, holding onto the stroller to keep it afloat. He and the baby — an 8-month-old girl, according to police — went under a few times, Cundiff said. The water temperature was in the mid-30s, National Weather Service data shows.
A man threw down his jacket for Cundiff to hold until a life preserver was found, Cundiff said. The man and the woman helped Cundiff and the stroller up the ladder to safety. Cundiff and the baby went into separate ambulances, he said. The baby went to Lurie Children’s Hospital in good condition, according to police.
For those who know Cundiff, his reaction is no surprise. Karen Cundiff, Cundiff’s mother, said he has always helped and connected with others. She recalled that when Cundiff was a teenager, he made a point to shake hands with every person experiencing homelessness he came across one day on vacation.
Karen Cundiff said she’s “amazingly proud” of her son.
“I’m so happy that this baby has a chance for a future and a life,” said Karen Cundiff, who lives in Kansas. “I’m so glad both (he) and the baby are OK because both of them could have died.”
Cundiff stayed at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center overnight for observation before getting discharged. The doctors were monitoring his heart, he said, for a buildup of enzymes due to exertion, adrenaline and cold exposure. Cundiff said his levels spiked up to over 13 times the norm.
Recovery is going well, Cundiff said, and although he said he keeps hearing the “ding, ding, ding” of medical bills, he’s in good spirits. A comedian, he said he started joking about the situation while he was in the hospital.
Cundiff has performed on multiple stages in Chicago, including House of Blues Chicago and Comedians You Should Know at Timothy O’Toole’s Pub, after moving to the city eight years ago to pursue comedy. He said he talks about his experience as a transgender man and his everyday observations in his stand-up sets.
As he has a “darker” sense of humor, Cundiff said audiences at his upcoming shows may hear a joke about the Belmont Harbor rescue.
“The way I do comedy is I have something that happens and I just go onstage a few times and I just spit it out and see what hits and what doesn’t,” Cundiff said.
Cundiff may be a local celebrity by the time of his next set. He’s all over Chicago news, and the GoFundMe his girlfriend and friends started has raised over $40,000.
But Cundiff said the harsh criticism he’s seen online that the woman with the baby was careless isn’t accurate. He said he didn’t talk to the woman after they were out of the water — she was hysterical and there was a language barrier — but he hopes she’s doing all right.
“When you almost lose your kid like that, you don’t need the world judging you too, especially when it wasn’t anything on purpose,” Cundiff said. “There was no neglect or anything like that. It was just a freak accident.”
Despite the chaos, Cundiff said he trusted his gut in how he reacted, hoping for the best.
“I think we all have a fight-or-flight,” Cundiff said.
