Rescuer: ‘I needed to save her life’
Hero pulls driver from burning car in Reading
READING — A holiday cookout began with a beer and ended with a heroic rescue by a 25-year-old who dragged an unconscious woman out of a fiery wreck yesterday afternoon.
“The lady was a stranger to me, but at that moment she was family,” Brandon Finnen told the Herald yesterday. “I was doing what I would do for any other family member. I needed to save her life.”
Witnesses said the Salem man — who only moments before arrived at a Memorial Day barbecue and cracked open a beer — sprinted to the corner of Spring and Salem streets after partygoers heard a loud bang.
That’s when Finnen saw a desperate young woman struggling to open a locked door handle as the car’s engine burned and another woman lay trapped in the wreckage of the driver’s seat.
“The second I got to the corner of the street, I saw smoke and I saw the car on fire. I saw the niece, she had gotten out of the passenger seat; she was crying frantically,” said Finnen, who is the dad of a 3-month-old baby girl. “I pushed her back, and took it into my own hands. I took off my sweatshirt and wrapped it around my fist. I hit (the driver’s window) four or five times. ... Every time I hit the car, it felt like the flames were getting bigger and bigger, and I’m getting more and more nervous trying to get the woman out.”
That’s when a neighbor came to the rescue with a wooden baseball bat, Finnen said.
“I just swung the bat into the window. I swung as hard as I could, and I opened it up,” he said. “It was relieving. It was a whole new chance to get her out.”
When he finally opened the door, Finnen unstrapped the woman’s seat belt, but her body was still tangled in it. He freed her, and then another man came to help and grabbed the woman’s feet as Finnen held her by the torso. They managed to get her across the street, and away from live wires they feared would cause the burning car to explode.
Reading police said last night the Ford struck a utility pole shortly after 2 p.m. and the driver was hospitalized in an unknown condition.
Finnen said the driver’s niece told witnesses her aunt had suffered a seizure.
The woman was unconscious as he pulled her out of the Ford, and was bleeding from the face and neck.
Samantha Fuschetti, 24, who hosted the neighborhood barbecue and called 911, called Finnen — a sports bar manager — a hero.
“Brandon’s that type of person that would rather risk his life than see someone die in front of his eyes,” she said. “It was a miracle because he just came and wasn’t even here for not even five minutes.”
“It was something special,” said Samantha’s brother, P.J. Fuschetti, 20. “Not everyone has the guts to do that. Usually, you just see people watching, videotaping. He jumped right up and tried to help.”