After Duck-boat crash on Delaware River, Navy springs into action

CREW MEMBERS from two Navy vessels visiting from Virginia and docked next to the Independence Seaport Museum on Wednesday leaped into action when they heard a barge had crashed into a Duck boat.

"I told my people politely that they needed to get moving," Senior Chief Charles Weaver recalled saying after he saw victims in the Delaware River.

Once the special-warfare boat got close to the scene, Weaver deployed a smaller boat to assist those in the water.

Although the crew helped four people out of the river and about five people onto land, Weaver said city police had everything under control.

"It's great that we had an opportunity to assist, but I'm quite sure that if we weren't here, they would have done fine without us," he said.

"One of our guys dived in from the landing, and a police officer told him to swim to shore to save his own life," Special Boat Operator 3rd Class Jared Bendetta said, laughing. "This is what we do. We don't think about our own lives."

Weaver said that he found no need to deploy divers but that his men were on "autopilot" and ready to work.

"If it were up to me and I had the right equipment, I would have been down there all night," said Special Boat Operator 2nd Class Felipe Silva.

The Navy men weren't the only ones to jump into the river to save passengers.

Philadelphia Police Detective Tim Brooks, 44, said he was in his office at the U.S. Customs House on Chestnut Street near 2nd when the collision occurred. He ran to the river with his partner and, after seeing four survivors clinging to a pylon in the river, shed his wallet, shoes and gun and dived in.

Brooks said he handed one panicking young girl to a Coast Guard boat that threw him a line, and then began to help the three other survivors in the river after receiving a life vest.

Still, he didn't consider himself a hero.

"I did the same thing that any cop from here to California would have done," Brooks said. "You do what you must do."