Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Paraglider saves drowning woman
Driver stuck in canal full of alligators
A HEROIC paraglider swooped down to rescue a woman from an alligatorinfested canal.
Cristiano Piquet was filming his flight with a friend in Florida when he spotted Marcia Fuste clinging to her vehicle.
Estate agent Cristiano had descended to watch an alligator in the waterway but then heard Marcia’s screams.
In the video, he shouts “Need help?”. Terrified Marcia, 64, replies: “Oh my God. I fell with my car in here.”
The paraglider enlisted the help of a local, and the heroic pair used ropes to pull her out.
Cristiano, 40, said: “There was a big alligator and I came down to see it when I saw the car.
“I flew closer to the car and I saw a woman on top. In that
moment, I think God told me, ‘My friend, land and save that one life’. God cares about her life because he put me in that moment on that day.
“Maybe I would have flown somewhere else.
“We threw her a rope, and she was free, she was alive.”
He said that everything happened so fast, it was only after Marcia had been pulled to safety that her rescuers called emergency services. Marcia said she had spent hours fighting to keep her head above water until Cristiano spotted her.
She drove into the canal near the city of Homestead by accident after getting lost on the way home from Fort Lauderdale.
Marcia, a cancer survivor, said: “There was a big canal, and I slid right down into it. The window was open on my side and I crawled out, really quick.
“I was trying to keep my head above water. I did that from 7.30pm until seven-something in the morning when the glider found me. It was the most frightening experience of my life.
“I thought I was going to be there for days.”
She was treated in hospital for exhaustion and discharged.