Man rescued deer from frozen river

Jared Maitino and his brother-in-law recently visited their favorite fishing spot on the Chagrin River at Woodland Park in Eastlake, Ohio, a place littered with deer. “We noticed it was frozen over. We didn’t think it would be frozen over, because we had a few warm days, and we looked down and we’re like ‘we can’t fish’,” Maitino said.



“As we were getting ready to leave, I noticed that there was a deer that broke through the ice, and it was struggling to get out of the water,” Maitino said. Jared quickly sprang into action. He raced back to his truck, grabbed some ratchet straps and headed back toward the river. Jared was wearing a Go Pro Camera, something he wears all the time when fishing.

“I have a chest pack so whenever I hook a fish, I turn it on,” he said. “I thought if I’m going to go down there and save this thing, I might as well get it on film.” The video from Jared’s camera shows him making a lasso with the ratchet straps. “When I initially tossed it, it didn’t make it around both ears like I thought it would so I just kind of pulled it a little bit tighter. It cinched up and as it cinched up, I noticed that I could actually get a good pull on the deer and I just started pulling,” he said.


YouTube link.

He pulled the deer out of the water and onto the shore. “I was just hoping that it wasn’t going to come right at us, that’s the only thing I wasn’t hoping for,” Maitino said. The deer ran off into the woods, and Jared is being called a hero by his friends. “I don’t consider myself a hero,” he said. “Everybody keeps saying you’re a hero, but if I would have saved a human then I thought maybe I’d be more of a hero, but it was still cool though.”