We occasionally post an "awful person nominee," though examples of truly superb behavior are much more desirable.
Patrick LaRose of Macomb County clearly fits the latter category, as Tammy Stables Battaglia describes in the Free Press:
When Patrick LaRose saw an 11-year-old boy go through thin ice on a lake in Shelby Township, he took action — crawling and breaking through to save the boy and become a Thanksgiving Day hero.
The only thing on his mind, LaRose said, was getting the boy to the shore.
“At that point, he was pleading with me — he was like, ‘Please don’t let me die! Please don’t let me die!’ ”
The 38-year-old rescuer tells Battaglia what he saw during a holiday dog-sitting stay at the Crystal Lakes apartment complex, where a cousin lives:
He was brewing a pot of coffee and looking out the second-floor balcony window when he saw the fifth-grader go through the ice on the 10-acre lake surrounded by 400 apartments at Dequindre and 23 Mile Road.
“I’m like, ‘No one’s out there helping him … someone’s got to do something,’ so I threw on my coat and ran down,” he said.. . .
He grabbed a rake from a resident’s porch and crawled out onto the ice toward the boy, who was closer to the opposite shore.
“I reached out with the rake for him to grab it. The weight from him getting closer to the patch of ice I was on when he grabbed the rake made the ice below me crack, and I fell in,” he said.
LaRose, an unemployed tech executive who grew up in St. Clair Shores, swam to shore with the 11-year-old, who's fine.
"I am thankful that the child is alive and that I am alive,” the rescuer tells Ursula Watson of The Detroit News. “Thinking about how it could have been has given me a new appreciation for life.”
