Dog saved by quick-thinking neighbors

Lifelong Baldwin resident Brian Kircher had just returned home around 4:45 in the afternoon of Nov. 15 when he and his friend Vinny Sarli heard some noise from the canal behind the house.

“I heard commotion out in the backwater,” Kircher recounted. “I heard people yelling, so I went running out with my friend. We saw a dog in the water, bobbing up and down. It looked like it was in trouble.”

Marley, a large black dog that Kircher suggested was “at least part great Dane,” and which belonged to a neighbor, had leapt into a canal bordering Kircher’s property. “One of my neighbors said the dog was wandering around when something scared it and it jumped off the dock,” Kircher said. “The dog probably swam a good three or four hundred feet, from one end of the canal to the other. Overall, it might have been in the water for 15 minutes or more.”

Kircher and Sarli ran to the water’s edge and began calling the dog in an attempt to lure it onto a float near the dock at the rear of Kircher’s property. “We tried to get the dog to our side of the water,” Kircher said. “It was scared out of its mind and very timid. Initially it started swimming away from us, but we were finally able to coax it onto the float. We grabbed its collar and secured it.”

But Marley’s wet and wild adventure wasn’t quite over. Because of the dog’s size, Kircher and Sarli found it difficult to haul him from the float onto dry land. Thinking quickly, Kircher called to his wife. “I yelled for some bath towels, and we wrapped them around the dog like a sling. Even then it took several tries to lift the dog out of the water.”

Once they’d landed their catch, Kircher, Sarli, and James Nessler — a dog-loving youngster from the neighborhood — dried and comforted the frightened animal and gave it food and water. Eventually, they contacted the dog’s family by way of information on Marley’s collar, and the thankful owner came to collect the dog about an hour later.

The Baldwin fire and police departments both responded to the scene of the incident, but the situation was resolved before they arrived.

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