'Feeling Around With My Feet': First Responders' Account of an Underwater Rescue

Aaron Trant, a 32-year-old St. Louis Park police officer who joined the force a year-and-a-half ago, arrived at the holding pond just minutes after the first 911 call was placed shortly after 6 a.m. Thursday morning.

About 50 feet from shore, Trant saw a woman in shock, up to her waist in water, standing next to a man in his boxers. The two stood on the woman's Pontiac sedan, completely submerged underwater and holding her three children, ages 1, 5 and 7, and her live-in boyfriend’s 5- and 6-year-old daughters.

“She couldn’t really say much besides, ‘My kids, my kids, save my kids,’” Trant recalled Friday afternoon, his voice choking up, during a press conference at the St. Louis Park police station.

The shirtless man next to her, later identified as Joel Oine of St. Louis Park, had sprinted down without hesitation into the frigid pond, stripping off clothes as he ran, a red-chested symbol of selflessness.

The woman’s voice ringing with desperation and fear, Trant’s instinct was to rush to her through the icy, mucky water.

“Your emotions take over and your heart tells you you’ve got to just go in,” he said.

But his partner, Sgt. Bryan Kruelle, heard the distant screaming of a fire engine’s siren and persuaded Trant to wait, to “prepare the scene,” to conserve their energy.

“It was dark, not easy to see who’s out there, the water was freezing cold,” he said.

Soon firefighters and more police began to arrive. While Tim Smith, a St. Louis Park firefighter, was donning his inflatable diving suit, police officers entered the water.

“We took our gun belts off and waded in there,” Sgt. Jon Parker said. “I got up to about my waist in water, and the mud must have been a foot deep. Each one of my legs felt like it weighed 40 pounds. There was just no way we could get to that car.”

Once Smith was dressed, he grabbed a length of rope, tossed it to the patrol officers standing waist-deep at the shoreline, and swam out toward the woman, Marion Guerrido of Brooklyn Center.

Arriving at the vehicle, it was difficult for Smith to get his bearings and his floating suit meant he couldn’t dive down underwater.

So Smith searched for the children with the only two tools he had: his legs.

“Feeling around with my feet was difficult because of the buoyancy of the suit,” he said. “Just trying to stabilize myself—if you can imagine a fishing bobber in the waves—it’s difficult to stay in one place.”

It wasn’t long before Smith had found the open driver’s side window and began using his feet to explore the vehicle’s interior.

“Trying to feel something that you can’t see and trying to imagine what it is inside of an area like a car—it was frustrating,” he said.

But soon his legs found a child and he scissored his feet around a hidden body.

“I felt a child and pulled him back toward my hands,” he said. “They pulled me with the rope, which is much faster than swimming; I basically lay on my back with the child cradled in my arms and they pulled me in.”

Smith swam back twice, pulling two more children out of the driver’s side window with his legs and a third out of the driver’s rear window (legs again).

"We had several of them who were tangled up on various objects in the car, we aren’t sure what," Smith said.

He was ready to call it a day when rescuers received a call from the state patrol. A fifth child was still in the car.

Smith had spent more than 20 minutes in the arctic-cold pond and could have left the job of recovering the fifth child to a backup team, but Guerrido and Oine had been brought into ambulance’s warmth and there was nothing to mark the car's location in the water.

Rushing back to the car, Smith worked with other responders to break the rear window and pull out the fifth child—45 minutes after the first 911 call.

The children were taken to Hennepin County Medical Center and University of Minnesota Amplatz Children's Hospital. As of Friday evening, two of the children, Alarious Coleman-Guerrido, 7, and Zenavia C. Rennie, 5, had died. The other three were listed in serious condition, though two were responsive to verbal commands.

Police officers and firefighters have attended stress debriefings, but the trauma and terror of Thursday morning will never fade from memory.