Hero’s welcome
Would-be East River savior feted by bizman
Aquaman is absent from this tale of a comic book, a plunge in the East River, and a generous New Jersey bill collector.
“I thought I was going to die. And I really didn’t care,” said Norman Pope, the story’s protagonist, who can’t swim yet tried to rescue a disturbed, naked woman from the East River.
Pope’s rescue try — recounted in the Daily News two weeks ago — so impressed Charles (Chuck) Grimley, whose business is persuading people to pay their bills, that he took Pope out for a steak dinner.
“You’re like the guy running into a house fire, not expecting to come out alive,” Grimley, dressed all in black, said upon meeting Pope on Monday night at the Warwick Hotel in Midtown.
“If I died, I died doing something good,” said Pope, who wore tastefully ripped jeans, new-looking New Balance sneakers, and a “Comme des Garcons” T-shirt.
It was 6 a.m. on Aug. 2, a Thursday, when Pope, 29, left the Lower East Side home he shares with his girlfriend and their daughter.
He walked down to the East River, near the Williamsburg Bridge, where he planned to clear his head by sitting down with an issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Then he heard a splash. “I’m from Boston! I can swim!” yelled the nude woman who’d jumped into the East River, known for its fast currents.
Pope, who doesn’t know how to swim, saw the woman go under — so he jumped in the water hoping to save her.
The woman used a backstroke to swim away.
There wasn’t anything Pope could do, so he grabbed on to a pylon and waited for help. He was rescued by Parks Department workers.
But the woman kept swimming, and made it to Pier 36, near the Manhattan Bridge, before police pulled her from the water.
“You placed the value of her life in front of your safety,” Grimley said.
“I didn’t even think about it,” Pope said. “I just did that out of the kindness of my heart.”
Pope appeared especially humble when Grimley’s wife, Marian Grimley, handed him an envelope with $500 in Duane Reade vouchers.
“When we heard you had a daughter, we figured this would be one of the better ways to help,” said Marian Grimley, who is executive vice president of Grimley’s Haddonfield, N.J., company.
“This is more than generous,” Pope said. “Even taking us out to dinner is more than enough. I didn’t want the publicity. I didn’t want any of this.”
“How did you find out?” Chuck Grimley asked Kesha Lespierre, Pope’s girlfriend.
“He comes home wet!” the girlfriend said, to huge laughter. “Filthy and wet. And I was like, did you go swimming? He didn’t tell me right away.”
The Grimley family likes headline-grabbing gestures of kindness.
In May, Grimley’s daughter Kristin presented a jersey signed by Los Angeles Angels slugger Mike Trout to Will Smith, an 11-year-old Queens boy who was stiffed out of his birthday present of a bat autographed by former Mets slugger Daniel Murphy.
Chuck Grimley appeared eager to help find a suitable job for Pope, who likes designing clothing.
“But let’s take a step back here and remember there’s a victim, who’s obviously depressed or mentally ill, whose life isn’t working out,” Grimley said.
Pope said he spoke to the mother of the woman who plunged into the water, and that she’s displayed a pattern of erratic behavior. Even so, Pope did not seemed at all fazed.
“I’m just a kid from East Harlem,” he said.
“Not too many people jump in a river who can’t swim,” Grimley said. “So you’re not the average kid out of East Harlem.”