BOCA RATON, FLA. (WSVN) - An elderly woman had the chance to properly thank the man who saved her life when he pulled her from a sinking car in Boca Raton.
It was an emotional reunion for Alice Modine. The Sun-Sentinel reported on the moments the 94-year-old was able to come face-to-face with the mystery man who saved her life.
Pictures posted to Facebook by West Boca News show first responders next to the half-submerged car. They show how close Modine came to not making it out of her car before it sank into a lake near the Hilton Boca Raton Suites, May 19.
“It was just inching along, yeah, going down,” said Modine.
She was driving home along Glades Road when she was suddenly caught in a rainstorm that blinded her, so she decided to pull over at a park just east of the Florida Turnpike and wait until the storm passed.
“I did park the car, but what I didn’t see was that I parked the car inside the lake,” said Modine.
She tried to escape, to no avail.
“I tried to move the car forward and back; nothing worked. Tried to pull down the windows; they didn’t work. Tried to open the doors; nothing worked,” said Modine, “so I thought to myself, ‘Well, this has happened before, not to me, but to other people, and I may just stay in this car forever. I’ve lived a good life. I had a very happy life. It may just be the end of it.'”
Water rose inside the vehicle until it came up as high as her glove compartment.
What she didn’t know was that a driver who had seen her struggling had pulled over.
“The door opened, and this very nice young man said, ‘Hold on to me. I’ll get you to a dry place,'” said Modine, “so I held on to him, did exactly as he told me, and he deposited me in the grass.”
More than a week later, Modine got to meet her guardian angel: Fabio Franca.
The good Samaritan relived those tense moments.
“I took her out of the car and tried to walk her back,” he said, and once we got to, like, close to where the grass is, I’m trying to step over, and that muck was going all the way up to my knee, and I’m like, ‘How am I going to get the both of us out of here?'”
Franca said it was all serendipitous that he was even on the road at that time. He had dropped off his son at an appointment that had been delayed by about 15 minutes.
He said he was just happy to help someone in need, but Modine says, “help” is an understatement.
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