Sten Spinella
The Day, New London, Conn.
STROUDSBURG, Pa. — Montville’s Chesterfield Fire Company engaged in a rescue operation in Pennsylvania this week. Sort of.
Mark Battista, an EMS lieutenant at Chesterfield Fire Co., was driving through inclement weather Sunday near Stroudsburg, Pa., more than 200 miles from Montville, when he came across an anomaly.
“There was a pretty large snow squall, and it was getting to whiteout conditions, and I’m driving carefully, looking around, and all of a sudden I saw this van over on its side and this father is looking at me frantic, waving his arms,” Battista said.
He immediately stopped and approached the man, but not before grabbing gear he had in his car for a possible rescue and his fire helmet, so he would have something reflective.
Battista ran over to the man and found a Ford transit van on its side on a small embankment. With the help of Leonard Friedman, the man who asked Battista for assistance, he extricated 11 people from the van, including Friedman’s wife and children, two of whom were infants.
According to Friedman and Battista, the passengers exited the car out of the passenger-side front window.
“The dad was grabbing his kids, putting them toward the window, and I’m physically picking up all of his kids, his wife, and putting them over on the side of the road,” Battista said. “One of the daughters who was holding the newborn slipped with the newborn in her arms; it was a very chaotic situation. I’m just glad that I was there.”
Battista said he saw the car was smoking, and the horn was on, “so I just wanted to get them out and get them out quickly.”
Friedman said he’s glad Battista was there. The father and husband was en route to his home in Toronto with his family when the weather worsened.
“It was raining, then it started picking up into snow. The road got slippery, things got out of control, and we ended up in a ditch facing traffic on our side,” Friedman said. “Thankfully, everyone was wearing their seat belts. We pushed up a free door and flagged down Mark, who was driving by. I told him to hurry up because I had kids in the car. I didn’t know what could happen, maybe the car could blow up.”
Friedman described Mark running toward the van and eventually pulling people out one by one, then sending them to take shelter and stay warm in his car.
“He was extremely helpful,” Friedman said. “He turned around to make sure we were OK, to make sure EMS came, to make sure everything was good, it was remarkable. The punchline is, I wanted to give him a tip for helping me, and he wouldn’t take it. I think that’s amazing. It shows he’s a good guy. He wasn’t doing it for money, he was doing it to be a good person.”
Battista recounted a nearby tow truck driver jokingly berating him to take the money Friedman offered. But he said he didn’t think of money when stopping his car or going toward the van.
A few people who had been pulled out of the van had left their shoes in it, so Battista offered them three pairs of socks each from his recently acquired set of 16 socks.
Local emergency personnel later arrived at the scene, and the Friedmans, who emerged from the accident relatively unscathed, all refused treatment.
Battista happened to be in Pennsylvania because he has spent more than a month working there. Part of a 15-person team, he is working for AMI Inc., a health care company, conducting COVID-19 screenings in rural areas on behalf of the Pennsylvania Department of Health. He came home on New Year’s Day to take a break and visit family. While back in Connecticut, he ran two EMS calls for Chesterfield Fire Co. before returning to Pennsylvania.
Battista never expected this kind of attention, but Friedman reached out to Chesterfield Fire Co., resulting in a Facebook post from the company.
“The training we receive through the fire department really helped make sure that when I was taking them out of the van, I was cognizant of any deficiencies or delays or them being hurt in a certain way,” Battista said. “I was pretty emotional on the ride home afterward. I believe in karma. I was, if anything, more grateful to them than they were to me, to be able to be there and help them and make sure they were safe. The timing was absolutely impeccable.”
Chesterfield Fire Co. PIO Steven Frischling posted about what Battista did on Sunday, and noted that the Friedmans are a Jewish family. He said he received a phone call from a Canadian number, and Friedman spoke to him primarily in Yiddish, “not a language commonly spoken around The Town of Montville.”
“Luckily I speak some Yiddish, and what followed was me being told all about the Chesterfield Fire Company’s EMS Lieutenant, Mark Battista, having pulled this man’s family — 11 people, including two babies — from their rolled-over van on I-80 in a snowstorm, near Stroudsburg, PA, roughly 210 miles from the edge of the Chesterfield Fire District.”
Friedman called Battista a “blessing.”
“Mark was sent from heaven as a messenger, an angel, to help us,” he said. “People should take a lesson when they see something. Don’t assume people are OK, like Mark didn’t. Many people drove by without stopping, even before the cops and the ambulance arrived. They see a van and children coming out of the van, and they didn’t stop to help. We have a lot of people, and we needed a lot of help.”
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