An angel among us

BY LINDA SMITH HANCHARICK
WEST MILFORD — Randy Saracco doesn't usually stay up late. This busy father of three is in bed long before midnight most nights. But that wasn't the case on Thursday night, March 17. He and his wife Laura did stay up, for no particular reason, sitting for part of the cold night outside of their Union Valley Road apartment. Just as they were getting ready to go back in at about 1:45 a.m., they heard a loud sound.
"It was a thunderous sound," Saracco, 33, recalled. "Boom, boom, boom."
He waited a few minutes in case there would be more. There wasn't. No screeching, no crashing. But he was unsettled. And so was Laura Saracco, who suggested he get in his car to go see what happened. "Someone might be trapped," she told him.
So he did.

Saracco drove down Union Valley Road, past Bald Eagle Village and Apple Acres but he didn't see anything on this dark night. He came upon a neighbor out, picking up her mailbox, about a quarter mile from his apartment. He stopped when he noticed her. A vehicle had hit her mailbox, he said, and woke her up in the process. He called the police. Then he noticed debris on the road, including a dresser. So he called the police back to say there was debris in the road and maybe the accident involved a truck. It was 2:08 a.m. when he made the second call.
Then he heard the moaning.
"I heard this strange moaning sound," he said. "It didn't sound familiar. Not a coyote or anything."
On this very dark, very quiet night, Saracco started jogging up Union Valley Road toward the sound. He was headed back the way he had come, even though he hadn't seen anything on his short ride. He ran about 50 yards and saw the tail lights of a pick-up truck, upside down in the pond adjacent to the Apple Acres property. He ran toward it and, from the glow of the lights, saw a person in the middle of the pond, about 10 feet from the immersed truck. He also saw debris strewn along the lawn, even a little kid's sweatshirt on the branch of a tree.
"I took off my sweatshirt and went into the water. I went in slowly, telling her who I was," he recalled two weeks after the incident. "I told her 'My name is Randy and I'm gonna get you out of here'."
When he got closer, he saw she had a big gash over her right eye and was bleeding pretty badly.
The water, he said wasn't deep, maybe three and a half feet deep, but the mud on the bottom was. He felt himself sinking in with every step. He was losing his shoes as he tried to lift his feet out of it. And the water was very cold.
When he reached her, he held her under her arms and walked slowly back to the shore. She couldn't put weight down on her legs.
"I am CPR and first aid certified so I knew what not to do," he said.
And he asked her the obvious question. "Is there anyone else in the truck with you?"
"She insisted she was alone," Saracco said, although his gut told him otherwise.
By the time he got to dry ground, the police had arrived and helped her out. He went over to the truck to see if anyone else was there, this time armed with a flashlight from police.
"I was still in the water so I figured I would look. There was no sign of anyone else," he said.
He was cold and wet, so he went home to dry off, change his clothes and let his wife know what happened. When your adrenaline is pumping, you don't always realize how much time has passed, he commented. He was in the water about 25 minutes, according to the neighbor with the mailbox. "It was freezing," he said. Then he returned to the scene to speak with police investigators.
"That's when the body popped up," Saracco said.
Saracco was beside himself.
"I don't know if she was in shock or what," he recalled. "I don't know, because I wouldn't have left that water if I had known someone else was in there."
The body of a man came to the surface about 15 to 18 feet from the truck in the water, he said, while he was back home.
"I wanted to go see how the woman was and talk to her, but I was afraid she would ask me about the guy. I didn't know what my reaction would have been. I didn't want to be the one to tell her about him," Saracco said.
He was distraught, feeling that if he knew there was someone else involved, he could have possibly saved him. Others have since told him he did as much as he could.
"If this was one of my kids, I would pray someone would jump in to help them," Saracco said, which is why he didn't hesitate to go into the frigid pond himself.
Years ago, he said, if you had a flat tire on the road, 25 people would stop. "Now you're lucky if anyone stops."
Saracco grew up here in West Milford and he coaches four sports teams for his three sons - football, baseball, basketball and indoor soccer. He is connected to the community. He knows many people in town, but he didn't recognize the woman. He couldn't even estimate how old she was because of the conditions. All he knows is she said her name is Julie.
He went to Chilton Hospital about a week later to see if maybe she was there but he didn't even have her name. He just wanted to find out if she was alright.
Many circumstances that night that usually don't occur, did, most obviously Saracco being awake that late and hearing the sound; Laura Saracco suggesting he go check it out; the neighbor being out by the mailbox.
"If she wasn't out there, I wouldn't have stopped," Saracco said. "And I would have never heard the moaning."
Divine intervention? "I guess so."
Ironically, this wasn't the first time Saracco has been in this situation. When he was about 15, he and his buddy, Tim, were skating on a lake in town playing hockey. They noticed a little girl walking on the ice but near the edge. They knew the ice wasn't thick enough near the edge to hold her, so they skated over.
"We knew we'd go through the ice ourselves," he said. He held onto one end of the hockey stick and Tim held the other. Saracco fell through the ice and reached for the seven-year-old girl, pulling her out.
About 10 years later, he was at the Country Roads Deli and a young woman came up to him and gave him a big hug. It was that grateful girl he and Tim had rescued years earlier.

Editor's note: The West Milford Police have confirmed there was indeed a fatal accident on that night at the site but said they could not give any information because of the ongoing investigation and possible charges. The Passaic County Prosecutors Office, which is involved in the investigation, also would not comment last week and a call this week was not returned. No police report has been made available for the incident as of yet.