A 9-year-old was just barely saved from a death by seatbelt this week on the Verrazano. Luckily, two Bridge and Tunnel cops were on the scene and able to free the boy, whose neck had become entangled in the seatbelt mid-span, just in time. "This kid wasn't talking, he was turning colors," recalled Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Officer Edward Grimm. "It looked like his eyes were going back and forth. The mother was hysterical. The whole scene looked like something out of a movie."
The incident occurred on Wednesday around 7:10 p.m. when the officers responded to a report of a disabled SUV, a 2012 Honda Pilot, on the Staten-Island bound side of the lower level. Despite the traffic he approached the car and "heard the frantic screams of Khrystyna Pendorak, 30, of New Dorp Beach." Inside the woman's car they found young Arthur Tyminsky, choking in the back seat:
"He had a seat belt wrapped around his neck, I would say... eight times," Grimm recounted. "It was like a piece of tape around his neck. You actually saw his skin coming over the belt because it was so tight, and the kid was turning colors. He wasn't talking."
Though the officers speculated that the boy may have been playing with the seat belt when it retracted and tightened on it, they said they didn't know for sure how he had become so tightly entangled. The belt was so tight, they couldn't even get their fingers between it and the boy's skin.
Luckily, Grimm had a folding knife on him and soon cut the boy free. Arthur then began to start breathing and talking and was treated, and released, by EMTs soon after. When reached at her home, the boy's mother told the Advance that "this is like lessons for life," and said the whole ordeal and the attention it brought had been "stressful."
