Danbury players credited with off-ice assist

DANBURY, CT – Young fans idolize their local hockey players as heroes on ice. When a player dives fearlessly to defend a shot or a goaltender makes what looks like an impossible save on a breakaway look easy, kids see those acts of skill and athleticism as acts of heroism. On Tuesday, November 17th, the members of the Danbury Whalers and their traveling party added a new dimension to their team by redefining off-ice heroism for their fans.
Following a 5-4 overtime victory over the Broome County Barons in Binghamton, New York, the Whalers packed up for what would turn out to be an eventful drive back home to Danbury. By the time they returned to their own beds in the early hours that morning, the team was credited with maybe the biggest assist of all: helping to save the life of a complete stranger by acting as first responders on the scene of what could have been a fatal accident.
Between 1 and 2 a.m., the team bus was traveling eastbound on Interstate 84 near the New York-Connecticut border (approximately 15 miles west of Danbury) when bus driver John Phenix

saw a pick-up truck that had gone past the bus minutes before lose control on the wet and windy highway. As he yelled back to awaken the sleeping team members, he watched in horror as the truck went off the road.
“The only thing I really saw was the headlights going crazy. I knew something had happened because of the flash of the headlights,” Phenix, who also drives for the New York Aviators, said. I followed the headlights off into the side of the ditch and saw the truck literally go up and it hit the trees. I think the trees elevated the vehicle and then it came down and landed front first and then it rolled onto its back.”
Phenix pulled the bus over to the side of the road and immediately several players got off and headed straight for the wreck to assess the situation and check on the driver. Whalers’ coach Chris Firriolo remembered how impressed he was when seven of his guys braved the elements and on-coming traffic to head toward the vehicle not knowing what they would find.
“I’m just very proud of them. It was very heroic. It took a lot of courage to go down there not knowing what to expect,” Firriolo said. “We all thought it was going to be a fatality. It kind of set a bigger picture for everyone – how precious life is and how easily it can be taken from you.”
Forward Devin Guy and goalie Ryan Donovan were the first two players to navigate down the embankment to the vehicle. Guy, a native of Highland Falls, NY, immediately began to mentally process what lay in front of him – something that didn’t surprise his coach.
“He’s usually the first one to stick up for a teammate,” Firriolo said. “It wasn’t a surprise that he was the first guy to go in there and assess the situation.”
The players checked around the truck, looking for any sign of fire or a potential spark ignition source. Given the fact that the truck was positioned on a tree and unstable, they knew that they needed to work fast.
“Myself and Ryan Donovan had climbed down into the ravine and crawled underneath a tree that was holding her car up. We were able to squeeze underneath (to get to) the cab area,” Guy said. “So, we’re underneath the truck at this point and trying to get out of there as quick as possible.”
Donovan said that they could hear noises coming from the cab, letting them know that someone was still alive inside the wreckage.
“We went up to the driver side door and it was completely buried in the dirt. We could hear that she (the driver) was rustling around and talking,” Donovan, a Rexford, NY native and former net minder at UMass-Boston, said. “Devin went in there. We got a flashlight and I came in right behind him.”
When Guy made voice contact with the woman, whom they guessed was in her late teens, he could tell that she was in a state of panic. He immediately began to try to calm her by letting her know that she was not alone.
“She had just been through a traumatic experience so I said ‘Hi, my name is Devin and this is Ryan. We play for a professional hockey team. We’re here to help you. Help is on the way. The ambulance is coming’,” he said. “Once she was able to see other faces down there with her, I think it helped calm her down a little bit.”
Up on the interstate, Phenix and goalie Nick Niedert were contacting 911 operators to get help. When the operator asked for location information, Niedert sprinted down I-84 while on the phone to find the closest mile marker so that emergency personnel could pinpoint the spot of the accident.
Guy and Donovan were able to see that the woman had been displaced to the passenger side of the truck – a lucky thing because the pair could see that the front end on the driver’s side was completely caved in over the steering wheel. Drawing on his experience as a summer lifeguard, Guy knew that they needed to determine whether the woman was injured and to what extent in order to ascertain whether they could remove her or if they needed to wait for help. Through conversation, the woman told the players that she did not feel that she was injured badly but that she could not get out of the wreck on her own.
They determined that the best way to get the woman out was through the cab’s back window. After instructing the woman to shield herself as best she could from any flying glass, Guy and Donovan proceeded to smash out the window using a combination of a rock and kicking at the glass. Once that was accomplished, the seven players worked in assembly line fashion to pass items out through the back to make room for removing the victim.
Being the smaller of the two, Donovan, with Guy holding on to his feet and steadying the flashlight, went in through the window to guide the woman out. It wasn’t easy but the pair were successful in extricating the woman from the truck.
“I’m a little smaller than Devin so I put my body in there while he was kind of holding onto the flashlight and holding onto me to make sure that if anything happened he could pull me out. I just told the girl that she was okay. I told her to grab my hands and we slowly were able to pull her out,” Donovan said. “She kind of looked around at one point and got kind of frantic and didn’t want to come out of the truck so Devin started talking to her a little more while he kind of was pulling her out. We finally got her half way out and Devin grabbed her feet and flipped her up over the back.”
After taking a moment to make sure the woman was okay, Guy and Donovan got her up to the team bus. The rest of the team was there with warm blankets and assurances that everything was going to be fine. Soon after, emergency personnel arrived to take over.
Amazingly, the woman appeared to have sustained only minor injuries including cuts and a possible broken finger. Guy was treated by the emergency responders for cuts on his hands and shards of glass embedded in his arms from pulling the victim out of the truck.
“Thankfully everybody was okay,” Guy said. “At the end of the day, I think I was the one who sustained the most injury with the glass in my arm.”
Phenix, who years ago worked as an EMT, said that he was extremely proud of how the players handled the situation.
“It takes a lot of courage to look into a vehicle after an accident like that. You never know what you’re going to find,” he said. “It takes a lot of guts. My hat comes off to these boys.”
Reflecting back on the event, Donovan said that everything that he and Guy did came simply from natural instinct and a sense of caring about others.
“I guess it was probably just our natural instincts that made us the first ones there. We had to go over there and assess what was going on,” he said. “I guess we probably really weren’t thinking what potentially could happen to us. We just kind of thought someone was in trouble and the right thing to do was to help and make sure that everyone was okay.”
Both Guy and Donovan were quick to credit the entire team’s efforts in saving the woman, every player doing what they could to help bring about a successful ending.
“Our whole team deserves credit, not just me and Ryan. It was a whole team effort,” Guy said. “We were all concerned about one thing – the well-being of another human being.”
Donovan took it a step further, noting that something like this event could be a catalyst for the rest of the season.
“We’re only ten games into our season. You really can’t ask for a better group of guys that meshed well instantly on and off the ice,” he said. “Not to be cliché but it really was a team effort. It wasn’t just me or Devin. It was the whole team out there. It brought us closer together as a team.”
Firriolo agreed with Donovan’s assessment, adding that what he witnessed was very much indicative of the character of the men who play the game.
“I think it certainly made the group a little tighter, made the bond a little thicker and stronger,” he said. “They (hockey players) are probably the most humble professional athletes out there. Certainly they are very courageous and I think it shows in the sport that we play and the character that’s required to play the sport.”
Whether or not the Whalers finish atop the FHL standings this year, they can be assured that they have already won something bigger – the gratitude of one young woman and the admiration of hockey fans everywhere.
Contact the author at wendy.hull@prohockeynews.com