Mother Screams for Help, Teen Boy Hailed Hero After Rescuing Her Son from Lake

By Kayla Kunkel April 26, 2019 at 1:38pm

A 14-year-old boy is being called a hero after he saved an older man from drowning in Scotia, New York.

Meka Boncie-Machin and his friends went to Collins Park to fish, but they realized, after they got to the lake, that they didn’t have enough poles. Instead, they decided to walk around the park.

As they were doing so, a 36-year-old man approached them and asked if they would like to go swimming in the lake. According to WTEN, swimming isn’t allowed at Collins Lake.

“We said no because he said it in a certain way that made it seem weird,” Boncie-Machin told WNYT.

The man then turned and jumped into the lake on his own.

Although the situation struck Boncie-Machin as odd, he assumed that the man just really wanted to take a swim.

After a couple of minutes, the man turned back toward the shore and began bobbing up and down.

“We thought he was just enjoying his time,” Boncie-Machin said.

Would you have jumped into the lake to save this man?

But when a woman on the shore began calling for help, the teen realized that the situation was more dire than he originally thought.

The woman, later identified as the man’s mother, told the teens that either one of them needed to go in or she would.

“I was going to but I wasn’t sure whether or not I should leave my friends alone with someone that I don’t know to get into the water with someone I also don’t know that seems strange,” Boncie-Machin said.

The panicked woman then jumped into the water to attempt to save her son, but she soon began calling for help again.

Ava Horton, 14, called 911 while Boncie-Machin and Emily St. John, 13, jumped into the water to try to save both strangers from drowning.

“He was unconscious, blue skin, purple lips and as my friend Emily got over, she helped halfway, and he started foaming at the mouth so we started rushing faster to help him,” he said.

First responders helped the teens once they arrived on scene and transported the man to a hospital where he was in a coma as of Wednesday evening.

Boncie-Machin is thankful that the man is alive and said that he wished he had jumped into the water sooner.

“If I helped him sooner he might have not been in a coma,” he said.

Regardless, he and his friends are being hailed as heroes.

Scotia Police Chief Pete Fresoni praised Boncie-Machin’s and his friends’ heroic actions.

“I am very appreciative of [Boncie-Machin’s] assistance yesterday and I commend him for his actions,” he told The Daily Gazette.

Rayn Boncie, his mother, is also extremely proud of her son’s actions.

“What he did was extremely admirable, and I’m not surprised. You always wonder what you’ll do in a situation like that, and now he knows. He’s a man,” she said.

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