Finest in action
Save jilted woman who jumped into Hudson
A jilted girlfriend jumped into the Hudson River on Sunday morning after her boyfriend broke up with her — but was rescued by a pair of quick-thinking cops, authorities said.
The chaos began when the woman and her beau got into an a quarrel along Pier 62 near W. 23rd St. about 8 a.m., cops and witnesses said.
“The girl said, ‘You did this to me!’ And he was saying, ‘Let’s be adults. This relationship didn’t work,’ ” said a witness who only gave his name as Richard, 71. “She had his backpack I think. She climbed over the railing … and they kept on kind of arguing. ‘I’m going to kill myself ’ and that.”
“She fell into the water and she had the backpack on,” he added.
“She obviously knew how to swim. And she wasn’t swimming, but she was floating on her back and she kept yelling at him, using some choice words.”
“He was yelling at first, but then after a while, he kind of calmed down,” Richard said. “He was very interested in getting his backpack back.”
NYPD Officers Christopher Collins and Tim Poon responded to a 911 call reporting a couple arguing wildly.
“We got a call for a dispute between girlfriend and boyfriend so we started heading over here,” Poon said at the scene later in the day. “As we were one block away, we got another call saying that a woman jumped into the water.”
“We saw that she was in the water,” he added. “We saw she was struggling with a book bag.”
Poon grabbed a rescue buoy, while Collins, a former lifeguard in New Jersey, sprang into action.
“I just start taking off my vest, shirt, gun belt,” Collins said. “Jumped in, went after her, swam after her.”
“I knew she needed help right away. She was definitely struggling. Her bag weighed 50 pounds,” he added.
“She had a big backpack on and it was tangled. And she couldn’t get it off, so I had to get [it] off her. I grabbed her, swam with her to the buoy.”
The woman was taken to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, cops said. Her name was not released.
Collins insisted he was just doing his job.
“I feel like it’s any other day,” he said.
“Every cop would have done the same thing — if they know how to swim.”