Rick Kraft: A hero haunted by memories

Rick Kraft untied his work boots, pulled off his Comcast shirt and tiptoed into the Mississippi River. A man in a half-submerged red car, blood oozing from his mouth, was stuck with one leg out the window.

Ten minutes earlier, Kraft had been heading home to West St. Paul after a day of installing and updating cable, phone and computer lines to homes in Minneapolis.

Stuck in the gridlock on 35W, Kraft exited at 4th Street, planning to skirt the jam on city streets. He heard a deafening thud at a University Avenue red light and looked over. He couldn't figure out why they'd demolished the bridge.

Zooming up a closed exit ramp, Kraft drove about 6 feet onto the bridge, before backing up and parking on the ramp. His mental tug-o-war was underway, as he measured risk to himself against a desire to help victims.

"If I get hurt, I'll just add to the pandemonium and I had my two daughters to think about," he said. "I was trying to wrap my head around how big a catastrophe it was."

He climbed down the river bank, found a gap in a crushed freight train and grabbed a two-by-four to measure the depth of the water.

Kraft, now 30, had no trouble walking barefoot over chucks of concrete toward the man with the bloody face. As a kid growing up in Maiden Rock, Wis., he'd climbed plenty of riprap.

With help from another man, he pulled Garrett Ebling by the armpits from the car. The man's eye socket was ruptured, his facial bones fractured and his jaw busted.

"I couldn't see his teeth, only blood," Kraft says. He cradled Ebling on his chest and crawled backwards, crab-like, up the decking until a backboard was lowered and Ebling was hauled away.

Then Kraft helped remove a woman who had drowned in her car.

Since Aug. 1, Kraft has received a heroism award from Comcast. He has been honored before a Vikings game. And he has been haunted.

"It lives with you, though not to the extent of the victims," he says. "At least now, I know what I can do in a situation."

"But it's not the same as when you're there," Kraft says. "For months, driving by every day on my way to work, I found my nerves on edge."

He sometimes thinks about the drowned woman, "wondering if there was something else I could do. I keep trying to think of ways I could have improved what I did down there."