Three or four other people quickly gathered. Eck, who had turned 24 the day before and is about to start his third year as a medical student at the Philadelphia School of Osteopathic Medicine, asked someone to call 911 and took off his shoes and shirt. "The car was sinking fast," Eck said.
Eck didn't know that the driver of the sedan, 55-year-old Sgt. Stephen Naughton, a 31-year police veteran, had already suffered a heart attack. First into the water, Eck got to the driver's side window and shook Naughton a couple of times, he said, and still got no response. He tried to unlock Naughton's seat belt but couldn't do it, he said, and "the car was sinking. In about a minute or minute and a half, we're both underwater."
Several others jumped in, including an off-duty police officer, and one man cut the seat belt with a knife. It was very hard to see what was going on in the murky water, Eck said.
"Five of us got the victim out," Eck said. It helped that his window was already open, but the door was locked. An assistant coach from the St. Joseph's Prep rowing team also had taken a motorboat to the scene. They all got Naughton over to the side of the river and up to the embankment. "People tried to give him CPR," Eck said.
While the group worked to save Naughton, Eck said, it didn't enter his head that Naughton may have already died. He apparently never revived. "You're not thinking about what could be," Eck said.
He also didn't know until later that Naughton was a policeman. Eck had cut his foot diving under the water and was taken to Hahnemann University Hospital, where Naughton also had been taken and was pronounced dead.
