Kenosha County Sheriff’s Deputy Colin Coultrip said he didn’t give much thought to the potential danger when he climbed into a canoe and began pushing the boat with his hands across a barely frozen pond toward a man who had fallen through the ice and was struggling in the water.
“I just went for it,” Coultrip said.
The deputy was one of about six who had responded at about 5 p.m. Sunday to a call of a man fallen through ice into a pond in Salem Lakes. When he and the other deputies arrived at the pond just east of Hooker Lake near the intersection of 236th Avenue and 80th Place, Coultrip said he hadn’t really expected to find someone in the water.
‘I thought it would be someone along the shore,” he said.
Instead, he and the other deputies found a much scarier situation — a man was struggling in the water toward the center of the pond about 75 feet from shore with growing dark making him difficult to see.
The Salem Lakes Fire Department had arrived by then, and a firefighter was able to pull the man off the ice.