Star Tribune
Driver recounts rescue from truck sinking in icy Crow River thanks to ‘true American hero’
The morning after his box truck vaulted off a highway into the icy Crow River below and his daring rescue by a quick-thinking stranger, James Nahl was recovering in his hospital bed when the phone rang.
“He was the first one to call the hospital,” Nahl, 25, said of the man who freed him from the truck’s cab Monday afternoon and helped him up the snowy embankment to the shoulder of Hwy. 101 in Rogers.
“He said he just saw it as something that that had to be done,” Nahl told the Star Tribune on Wednesday. “He didn’t do it for the attention.
“Like a true American hero, he jumped into action without hesitation.”
Nahl is not only grateful for the heroics of 46-year-old Christopher Kirk, but he is crediting him for possibly saving his life in the critical moments after the truck ping-ponged from the right guardrail to the left on northbound Hwy. 101 and then sailed down the slope into the water.
Nahl said he was heading to his home in Ramsey from work maintaining fire extinguishers when “I dozed off, and the first thing I saw was that first guardrail, then going down the hill and into the river. … Everything just felt really slow, but I felt like I couldn’t see anything.”
Nahl said he barely had time to contemplate his fate as he dangled by his seat belt inside the cab — propping himself up to keep his mouth above the river’s surface — before he spied Kirk on the phone in the distance and then seconds later working to free him.
“I panicked for a bit and started thrashing in the water,” Nahl said. “Luckily, the water was shallow enough to keep my mouth above the water.”
Kirk recalled seeing the same, with Nahl’s left shoulder and head in the water as he struggled to stay above the surface for air.
“I saw someone who was on the border or the edge of dying,” he told the Star Tribune Tuesday, putting aside worries of his own well-being and thinking: “I’m just gonna help get this guy out.”
Nahl said Kirk pulled him up and onto the back of the truck, where the box that held several fire extinguishers had been obliterated.
“He gave me a second to make sure I was OK,” Nahl said.
Kirk, of Otsego, was more blunt when speaking of their exchange in the chill of the moment: “‘Let’s get the hell out of here.'”
From there, Kirk and another person helped Nahl to a State Patrol squad car, he said.
Once he warmed up a bit at a time when the temperature was 0 degrees, Nahl was moved to an ambulance heading to Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, where Kirk checked in the next morning on how Nahl was doing.
Nahl was spared serious injury, other than bruised legs and “being sore everywhere.”
“With no seat belt,” he said, “I would have been thrown out the front windshield into the river or thrown out the back, and possibly not here having the conversation.”
The Minnesota Department of Transportation closed part of a state highway Wednesday evening near Austin because of a “major hazardous materials release” in the area.
Hwy. 56 from Hayfield to Waltham, a stretch covering about five miles, was closed in both directions and drivers were directed to follow a detour to Blooming Prairie on U.S. Hwy. 218.
No information on the hazardous materials released was immediately available.
A federal judge dismissed a civil lawsuit against Minnesota state trooper Ryan Londregan in the shooting death of Ricky Cobb II during a 2023 traffic stop.
The decision is the latest development in a case that has drawn heated debate over excessive use of force by law enforcement. Criminal charges against Londregan were dismissed by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty in June, saying the prosecution didn’t have the evidence to proceed with a case.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Nancy E. Brasel granted Londregan’s motion to dismiss the civil suit, arguing he acted reasonably when he opened fire as Cobb’s vehicle lurched forward with another state trooper partly inside.
Londregan’s attorney Chris Madelsaid Wednesday that it’s been a “long, grueling journey to justice. Ryan Londregan has finally arrived.”
On July 31, 2023, the two troopers pulled over Cobb, 33, on Interstate 94 in north Minneapolis for driving without taillights and later learned he was wanted for violating a felony domestic no-contact order. Cobb refused commands to exit the car.
With Seide partly inside the car while trying to unbuckle Cobb’s seatbelt, the car moved forward. Londregan then opened fire, hitting Cobb twice.
In her decision, Brasel said the troopers were mandated by state law to make an arrest given Cobb’s domestic no-contact order violation. She said it was objectively reasonable for Londregan to believe Seide was in immediate danger as the car moved forward on a busy highway, which would make his use of force reasonable.
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Donald Trump walked down the steps of the Boeing 757 that bears his name, walked across a rain-soaked tarmac and, after twice missing the handle, climbed into the passenger seat of a white garbage truck that also carried his name.
The former president, once a reality TV star known for his showmanship, wanted to draw attention to a remark made a day earlier by his successor, Democratic President Joe Biden, that suggested Trump’s supporters were garbage. Trump has used the remark as a cudgel against his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
”How do you like my garbage truck?” Trump said, wearing an orange and yellow safety vest over his white dress shirt and red tie. ”This is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”
Trump and other Republicans were facing pushback of their own for comments by a comedian at a weekend Trump rally who disparaged Puerto Rico as a ”floating island of garbage.” Trump then seized on a comment Biden made on a late Wednesday call that “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
The president tried to clarify the comment afterward, saying he had intended to say Trump’s demonization of Latinos was unconscionable. But it was too late.
On Thursday, after arriving in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for an evening rally, Trump climbed into the garbage truck, carrying on a brief discussion with reporters while looking out the window — similar to what he did earlier this month during a photo opportunity he staged at a Pennsylvania McDonalds.
He again tried to distance himself from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, whose joke had set off the firestorm, but Trump did not denounce it. He also said he did not need to apologize to Puerto Ricans.
”I don’t know anything about the comedian,” Trump said. ”I don’t know who he is. I’ve never seen him. I heard he made a statement, but it was a statement that he made. He’s a comedian, what can I tell you. I know nothing about him.”
