Brandon Hatton, a 29-year-old man from Utica, NY, faces charges after allegedly stealing a Utica Fire Department Rescue Vehicle and then leading police on a chase.
Brandon Hatton, a 29-year-old man from Utica, NY, faces charges after allegedly stealing a Utica Fire Department Rescue Vehicle and then leading police on a chase.
Brandon Hatton, a 29-year-old man from Utica, NY, faces charges after allegedly stealing a Utica Fire Department Rescue Vehicle and then leading police on a chase.
Brandon Hatton, a 29-year-old man from Utica, NY, faces charges after allegedly stealing a Utica Fire Department Rescue Vehicle and then leading police on a chase.
We were shouting to him from an expansion joint right through the side here. our rescue company, too. you see a little gap there. so there was no way. we had to pull one of our rescuers up from trying to go underneath this bridge. he was backed up by a whole mess of rat s nest, we call it, full of debris and the flood debris that was coming down. so we pulled him back and said, there is no way he s going back there. if he did, he s dead. reporter: yeah. i ll tell ya what, heroic. pulled him back. we said, let s get this going. we had deputy chief mccombs here, who drove the rescue truck here to us with our heavy rescue tools. we re part of a regional effort called the metro urban strike team. you saw our strike team. we have jackhammers, diamond saws, core drills, all that stuff. so we dropped the spy here and hoped he was right there, kind of estimated because we never saw him. we popped a hole right down here with our core drill. got our video camera on a pole.
Through. with me, i have fire chief brian mcdermott and i have mayor andre sayah. fire chief, you first. what happened wednesday night, here on this bridge, somebody was underneath this bridge. your team got a call. tell me what happened next. yeah. so we get the call. actually myself and mayor sayah was at the fire headquarters. we jumped into my truck. we took off down here. we heard rescue 2, which the truck is behind me here. they took off, got to the site, and found this gentleman. i ll show you right here. come with me. reporter: yeah, do. watch the hole. we don t need another one. reporter: actually, let s stay by the hole. the guy was under there. so we got on the riverbank. we got the guy who was over there. as you look from the side, you can see the water was up. he was trapped. now, we come back over here, we try to keep communication with him. watch your foot. we went right down over tried cutting this up to make more communication, but the joint was packed full o
And the pain of why this needs to be a solemn day. yes, there are people out there saying thank you after 9 1/2 years, but at the same time when you continue the story and hear the personal stories, just, it brings you down. lee s son, john, who died here, who was a firefighter from rescue 2, everybody from rescue 2 who responded, who came to this site, perished here. it was just an extraordinary loss. and if hopefully this event, and people watching it, you know, we re a society that tends to want to move on, tends to want to forget the hard stuff. remembering the heroes of 9/11, the victims who were killed in cold blood trying to do their jobs and the heroes who came in. if that is part of what we discuss now as we also talk about the mission and bravery of the commando, it s good for the country to remember the heroism that happened in this city around the pentagon and on that day. there is new life blossoming here at ground zero. they ve planted trees in the