By Peter Dujardin
Daily Press
NORFOLK, Va. — Officer Zach Hyman was filling out a routine police report Feb. 25 during a restaurant dinner break when a call came about a car going off the road on Route 58.
“It was a high priority call,” the Suffolk officer said. “Accident with injuries.”
The car had crashed into a waterway and was partially submerged, the dispatcher told Hyman. Two people were trapped inside — a 2-year-old girl in a car seat in the back and a 73-year-old woman in the front passenger seat.
What happened over the next several minutes saved two lives and led to Hyman being named the “Top Cop” of the year for Greater Hampton Roads area in 2021. He spoke to The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press this week about the harrowing rescue.
Hyman, 27, drove 2½ miles to the scene, near the landfill off Route 58 near Bob Foeller Drive, and found that the driver had managed to get out of the vehicle. “He was frantic, yelling that his daughter was in the water still in the car,” Hyman said
The 29-year-old man Hampton man fell asleep at the wheel. Watching the car sink, he was almost incoherent because he was so nervous, Hyman said.
“I gotcha, I gotcha,” the officer told the man, according to video footage of the incident.
Hyman spotted the sedan — down a seven-foot embankment, about five feet from shore. Its front-end was tilting nose-first into the water. Two men already were at the car, passers-by who were trying to help.
Hyman, who’s been on the Suffolk force for about five years, quickly took off his duty belt, telling dispatchers he was off his portable radio. With the air temperatures about 38 degrees that February night. he jumped into the frigid waters in his short-sleeve patrol uniform.
He saw water rising to the toddler’s chest as she cried. One of the passers-by was holding her head above water through the broken-out rear window.
Hyman took out a window punch tool — a spring-loaded device that shoots out a metal point — and shattered the side window near the car seat.
But as he trod water in the murky creek in the dark, supporting his weight with his arms on the window opening, Hyman had a difficult time unhooking the car seat’s harness. He took out his pocketknife and cut it in two spots.
“As I was moving the straps out of the way, the water was going right up to (her mouth), and she started gurgling water,” he said. “That was very close.”
Hyman released the girl from the seat, and the civilian pulled her through the rear window and took her to shore. “We got your baby,” someone told her father.
Hyman then turned his attention to the woman trapped in the front passenger seat. She was was still conscious but panicked as the water rose.
The officer took out his punch tool and broke that window, too. He reached in and cut the seat belt with his knife, then tried to pull her through the window. He was worried that the woman might get cut on the broken glass.
“But it’s one of those moments,” he said. “It’s better to have a few cuts than to drown.”
Hyman then cut another piece of the woman’s seat belt, and he and a civilian pulled the woman out through the window. After taking her to the shore, the officer returned to the car to grab the woman’s purse, which she had been gripping tightly because it contained her asthma inhaler.
“Probably about 30 seconds after we got everybody out of the car, I remember looking behind me, and the car is completely submerged,” he said. “It was gone.”
By that point, other emergency personnel were on the scene. Hyman had some forearm cuts from the rescue, and was shivering badly from the frigid water. He was taken to the hospital, where he was treated for hypothermia for a couple of hours.
“But nobody died, and that’s all that matters,” Hyman said.
For his efforts that February night, Hyman was voted the “Top Cop” for Greater Hampton Roads in 2021, over “top cops” from other police agencies. The awards, sponsored by Regional Crime Lines Inc., were handed out Nov. 20 at the Smithfield Center.
Hyman, the son of retired longtime Portsmouth Police Captain Ronald Hyman, knows such rescues don’t always end on a good note. Just a month earlier, Zach Hyman attempted another water rescue that didn’t end as well.
In that incident, a man drove off the road into the water about a quarter-mile from the site of the February accident. Hyman and an officer in training, Veronica More, were the first to arrive.
But the car was more submerged by that time, and the driver was unconscious under the water. Hyman and More got him out, swam him to shore, and began CPR. But he couldn’t be revived.
So when the February call came in, Hyman knew right away it was a life-or-death situation.
“I already knew the water was cold, and I knew what I was getting myself into,” he said. “I just knew I had to just get there.
“The adrenaline is in your system. And the mindset the whole time is, ‘You know what, I have a job to do, and I need to do the best I can the whole time.’”
If Hyman wasn’t close to the scene at the outset, he said, the outcome could have been very different. He had the crucial tools to help get the people out. He also credits the good Samaritans who stopped to assist. Without them, the rescue “would have been a lot harder.”
At the Nov. 20 luncheon, Interim Suffolk Police Chief Alfred Chandler credited Hyman for the rescue, and also praised the bystanders who “jumped into action to help.”
“We are all waiting for that opportunity where a bad thing happens and we can come in and be the person that is able to save a life,” Chandler said.
“It’s great to catch the bad guys, it’s great to solve the crime,” the chief added in a video released by the Suffolk Police Department. “But there’s nothing more rewarding than saving human lives. That’s what we are here for.”
The award “feels awesome,” Hyman said.
“It feels really good knowing that I had the opportunity to perform something like that,” he said. “It wasn’t something I was aiming to achieve. I was just doing my job ... I love this job, and being able to be recognized like that, I really appreciate it.”
NEXT: 50 states, 50 police heroes: How cops made an impact in 2021
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