Wasn’t cold enough to deter hero
HE EITHER has a lot of nerve — or no nerve endings.
A hero FDNY medic leaped into the freezing Hudson River on Saturday afternoon to save an unstable man who escaped an area hospital and jumped into the arctic waters.
Paramedic Niall O’Shaughnessy (inset) and his partner Mingze Wu were driving up the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan at 2:50 p.m. when they saw a group of cops near the river’s edge at Harrison and West Sts. When the pair pulled over, they found out a patient had wandered out of Lower Manhattan Hospital and tried to commit suicide in the Hudson. Despite the 24-degree temperature and the light snow falling, the daring lifesaver took off his equipment belt, grabbed a flotation device from his truck, gritted his teeth and jumped in after the man.
“I swam behind him and locked my arms around him to keep him secure,” O’Shaughnessy said in a lilting Irish brogue. Then the cold set in. “Within about 30 seconds, I could definitely feel it in my arms and legs,” he said. “They weren’t really working. I couldn’t barely get my hand around the ladder they had sent down.”
The man he was rescuing was doing far worse. “He was lethargic and definitely hypothermic,” O’Shaughnessy said. The rescued man was taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition.
It was O’Shaughnessy’s second river save — in July 2015, he hopped into the river after a suicidal woman near Pier 25 in Tribeca.
“It takes courage to do what Niall did today, placing his life on the line to save others,” said Oren Barzilay, president of EMS Local 2507.