The call came in at 1:35 in the morning. A car had gone off the road and into a small pond in Glendale Heights, Illinois, sinking twelve feet to the bottom. The air temperature was one degree Fahrenheit. Two officers arrived to find three people - two men and a woman - thrashing in broken ice, roughly 20 to 30 feet from shore.

Hands Above the Ice

On December 14, 2025, Officers Dennis Stachura and Marco Lomibao responded to a report of a submerged vehicle near Burdette and Roberta Avenues in the Chicago suburb.

When they pulled up, the car was gone - fully under.

What they could see were three pairs of hands sticking up through the broken ice.

"We started to see people's hands in the water - reaching out for air or just to stay afloat," Stachura later said.

Lomibao described the third person differently: "All I saw was hands."

Shovels and a Sledgehammer

Both officers went in.

The ice between them and the victims was too thick to push through by hand.

They improvised - using shovels and a sledgehammer to break a path while keeping each victim above water.

Stachura said he could feel the cold overtaking his body almost immediately. "I lost feeling in my body, it was so cold. My hands were on the ice, the ice was, the water was freezing," he told reporters afterward.

Backup arrived.

Officers from the Glendale Heights Police Department and crews from the Glenside Fire Protection District helped drag all three victims to shore.

The body camera footage, released by the department, caught the entire sequence - the officers going in, the improvised ice-breaking, the final pull to shore.

Everyone Made It

All three occupants were treated at hospital for minor injuries and released.

Stachura and Lomibao were checked out and uninjured.

Glendale Heights Police Chief George Pappas publicly commended both officers for "selfless acts" while putting their own lives at risk.

Lomibao described the decision in a single sentence. "At that point, it was life or death," he said, "and we both decided to choose life."

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