For Westbrook High School freshman Ricardo Agrinsoni, this week’s school vacation got off to a harrowing start.
Walking to his King Street home from the Mission Possible Teen Center at around 5 p.m. Monday, Agrinsoni, 15, decided to entertain his 14-year-old brother, Joseph, by sliding out onto the ice on the Presumpscot River.
But the fun quickly turned frightening when a misstep put Agrinsoni on his back and into the water. He started swimming feverishly.
“I was thinking I was about to die,” he said Tuesday.
A passer-by with a cell phone called the police, as Agrinsoni yelled to his brother to throw him the biggest stick he could find. Agrinsoni thought he’d be able to hold himself in one place by propping the stick in the water, but the stick never caught on the floor.
“It was too deep,” he said.
When the police arrived, they threw out a life ring, but the first one slipped past the boy. On the second attempt, it fell in front of him on the ice. Agrinsoni chopped his way to the rescue device and the three police officers pulled him out of the water.
“He’s lucky he’s alive,” said Acting Sgt. Thomas Roche, who took off his clothes and covered the freezing 15-year-old before he was transported to Maine Medical Center.
Agrinsoni, who had been in the water for about 15 minutes, was treated for mild hypothermia and released Monday evening. On Tuesday, he said it still hurt to bend his fingers, and he was soaking them in hot water to ease the pain.
A resident of Westbrook for just a few months, Agrinsoni, who moved from Portland, learned he had already made some good friends, when he got a call Tuesday from the teen center, where the news about what happened had spread. He asked his father for a ride there to show his friends he was OK.
“Everybody was hugging me really hard,” he said. “They were happy to see me.”
Agrinsoni’s father Richard said he hopes this experience makes his son think twice before doing anything risky.
“I tell him all the time, ‘Be careful,'” Richard Agrinsoni said. “This is what happens.”
He pointed to a sign hanging in their home that says, “Life grows sweeter everyday.”
“When you wake up everyday in the morning, read that,” he told his son, reminding him that he only has one chance to live.
According to Roche, about every four or five years, someone falls into the Presumpscot. He remembers one fatal incident about a decade ago.
“Everybody needs to stay off the ice,” he said. “We’re chasing kids off it all the time.”
But according to Agrinsoni, police won’t have worry about him anymore.
“I’ll never do that again,” he said.
Ricardo Agrinsoni shows how it’s still hard for him to bend his fingers the day after falling into the Presumpscot River. “He’s lucky he’s alive,” says Acting Sgt. Thomas Roche, one of the three officers that pulled him out of the freezing water early Monday evening.
Ricardo Agrinsoni, right, shares a hug with his father Richard and his cousin Herlin Martinez at their King Street home.
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