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SWAT officers make right move to save man from frozen lake
n BY DAN CAMPANA
The 22-year-old man fell from the fro- zen-over path into Lake Michigan’s frigid waters, seemingly out of sight behind a shoreline shelf of jagged snow and ice.
Only a passerby and a 911 caller on the 25th floor of a nearby hotel saw the man in the water around 7 a.m. on Feb. 15 — that is, until SWAT Officers Shane Cole- man and Peter Jonas arrived.
“We heard the call come over the air and decided to head over that way to see if we could be of some assistance,” Cole- man explained, noting that he and Jonas were on standby downtown as part of a special operations response team.
Jonas drove the pair to the lakefront and chose to approach from a different position. It proved to be a lifesaving de- cision, one that played out dramatically on video captured by cameras perched overhead.
“When we pulled onto that lower bike path...we immediately saw the subject bobbing in the water,” Coleman said.
The video shows the SWAT officers running south on that path with pur- pose, despite the uneven and icy terrain. To their left, firefighters and paramedics stood near a barrier on Lake Shore Drive near the Ohio Street curve at a vantage point that prevented them from seeing the man in the lake.
“We were just trying to get there as quickly as possible without slipping on the ice,” Jonas said.
Coleman recalled how the man was barely visible.
“His hands were at the surface of the water, but his head and shoulders were completely submerged,” noted Cole- man, who laid himself flat on the ice to reach down to get his arms around the man’s torso.
Jonas then grabbed hold of Coleman in something of a human chain, which quickly allowed them to pull the wa- terlogged man to safety with the help of a paramedic. Firefighters, additional paramedics and a marine unit diver all moved gingerly down the ice-covered
steps to approach the rescue point. Medics covered the man in a blan- ket before putting him into a basket for transport to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was later treated and
released.
Coleman and Jonas met with the man
and his family just a few hours later, something they said they won’t soon for- get.
“That was pretty awesome, to meet him after the fact,” Coleman said, adding that he also spoke with the man’s father.
“He was very grateful.”
If not for Jonas’ decision to take a dif-
ferent route to the call, “I don’t know that [the man] would have ever been found,” Coleman explained.
Both men took a modest approach when called to talk about the incident during a press conference.
“Any one of these [SWAT] guys...any other officer, if they were in that situa- tion, would have done the same thing,” Coleman said.
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