Two teenagers were rescued Thursday after falling through ice in Taunton, Massachusetts.
The two 14-year-old boys were spotted in the Taunton River around 2 p.m. Good Samaritans and first responders teamed up to save them.
Kevin Boss, a 54-year-old Taunton man, said one of the teens was trying to swim to the shore while the other was struggling to stay above the water.
Boss grabbed a rope from his vehicle to try to help the boys. Two other people, including Nick DaCosta, also pulled over to help before police arrived.
"One of my co-workers flagged me down, pointed me toward the water," said DaCosta. "That's when I stopped, I looked, saw the kids bobbing up and down."
The three adults joined four officers and used the rope to pull the boys out of the water.
The boys were taken by ambulance to Morton Hospital, but they are expected to be OK. They are believed to have been in the water for about five minutes.
Local
In-depth news coverage of the Greater Boston Area.
"If they were out there any longer, they wouldn't have made it," said Dacosta. "Because they were struggling, and it was cold, it's cold in that water."
The boys looked wiped out.
"Cold, wet, full of mud, scared," said John Tigano, who witnessed the incident.
Tigano said the ice was just too thin.
"That's one inch, with a strong current. The tide was moving out very fast. They could have been sucked under," said Tigano. "That would have been the end of them."
"I believe they'd just been dropped off by the buses after attending school," said Taunton Police officer Dan Williams. "One of them decided to go down and ice skate. Obviously, it went pretty wrong."
