Thursday, February 02, 2006

Good Samaritans all

Damn but this is such a sweet story.
A woman who rescues cats and another woman who rescues abused horses rescue a homeless local hero after hearing how he helped to rescue a drowning woman.
Keith Finsterwald, who does not swim, went twice into the Fraser River to try to rescue an injured woman whose truck had plunged past his squat and into the water. When police constable Gerry Proctor arrived on the scene, he had Finsterwald help him off with his boots and gave him his gun to look after while he made the successful rescue.
And now two women who heard about Finsterwald's part in it have given him work and a trailer.

The whole thing is thoroughly uplifting, but a small detail really stood out here for me : the police constable gave a homeless man his gun to look after.
How many places in the world do you think that would happen?

Link

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good point. I read somewhere that Finsterwald was already known to Constable Proctor, possibly because Finsterwald-who supports himself entirely by selling scrap metal parts he finds on the river-is up on charges for theft from a scrap metal dump site.
Did you hear the interview with F on CBC? Sucked.

Alison said...

You mean the CTV one? Yeah, I did.
Really excruciating.
I did like F's answer to their suggestion that he and the woman he helped save should meet : "What am I gonna say to her? - I tried to save you myself but I failed?"

Yet another guy who lost his house in the States over medical bills. He tried to explain this to the interviewer -"I wasn't always like this" - but she couldn't get it.
I met a lot of great homeless people in the States - vets or families - and medical bills were nearly always the cause of their being homeless.
Best we keep that in mind up here.

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