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.

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.'"

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.”