The men were teetering on the last vestige of their sinking boat when police reached them. Lt. Michael Macek of the East Lyme Police in Connecticut said the men had only seconds to spare when they were rescued.
Two Massachusetts men stranded of the coast of Long Island, New York, were brought to safety after rescuers were able to pinpoint their location using the visual surroundings visible in the FaceTime call they made.
Extraordinary video taken of the rescue showed the men were teetering on the last vestige of their sinking boat when police reached them. The only item that remains of their capsized vessel was one deck chair, which one of the men asked if they could keep as a souvenir.
The men were out on the water when they realized their boat was sinking. Panicked, they called 911 to report their vessel was going down.
“The boat is sinking, we need help,” one of the men told dispatchers, before sharing a terrifying update. “The boat flipped! It flipped over! It flipped over!” he said.
But the men were not sure exactly where they were located.
“They were adamant that they were in one spot, and knowing that I grew up here in the Bay and where they think they were, they were not,” dispatcher Mariaha Knight told Inside Edition.
That’s when Knight came up with a great solution: she told them to FaceTime so that rescuers could home in on the men's visual surroundings.
“When they got on the FaceTime we told them to turn the camera around so we can see what they see,” she said.
Lt. Michael Macek of the East Lyme Police in Connecticut found the men a quarter mile from the New York State border in the Long Island Sound.
Macek said the men had only seconds to spare when they were rescued.
“One of the gentlemen had gone into the water and he was shivering pretty extensively,” he told Inside Edition.
He said the FaceTime call was the key to spotting them.
“I do give a lot of credit to that FaceTime call,” he said. “Two individuals standing on top of a capsized vessel—it’s just as hard to find a needle in a haystack.”
