A Virginia tourist was left in dire straits after being separated from her husband — and feared for his life until two quick-thinking Brooklyn cops reunited the couple, authorities said.
She then sent them a heartfelt letter thanking them for their compassion.
The woman, identified just as Patricia P., planned to meet up with her husband at a friend’s Carroll Gardens apartment they had been staying at in the evening of Dec. 23. The couple, in their sixties, had split up so that she could shop while he saw a movie.
But when she got there, she began to fear the worst as she kept knocking and no one answered the door, authorities said.
Her phone was dead, and it was raining. None of the nearby businesses would let charge it so she could call her husband.
“I was a bit shaken and afraid something tragic had occurred,” she said, in a letter posted on the NYPD Facebook page.
A good Samaritan called police, and Officers James Wilson and Alexi Serpani from the 76th precinct, which covers Carroll Gardens, Red Hook and Cobble Hill, rushed to her rescue.
“She was really afraid, thought maybe he was dead,” said Wilson, who has seven years on the job.
They urged her to stand under a small overhang to avoid the rain and checked to see if there were lights on anywhere in the home, cops said.
“She was upset, almost crying, in an unknown city,” said Serpani, who also has seven years on the job.
They were able to open the exterior door and knocked repeatedly on the inside door, offering to force it open if the woman wanted.
“I didn’t want them to do that,” she wrote in the letter. “So they offered to take me back to the police precinct where I could dry off and get warm.”
She left a note on the apartment door with the phone number for the precinct. The cops then brought her to the Union Avenue stationhouse to charge her cell phone.
“We said, we’re not going to leave you on the street,” said Serpani.
Her husband called the precinct, and told the cops he had gone for a trip to Barnes and Noble– then gotten lost on his way back to the apartment.
The police drove Patricia back to Smith Street, where the happy couple reunited.
“It felt really nice, because I’m not from New York,” said Serpani. “I believe New York is a tough city, and people should more kind to each other.”
In Patricia’s letter, she wrote that many people believe New Yorkers are tough and uncaring– and that the experience changed her view of the city.
“In this case, nothing could be further from the truth,” she said. “I write this e-mail with much thanks for the caring attitude these officers displayed toward my situation, even though it wasn’t an emergency (thought it might have been) and their kindness and compassion towards me.”