Bystanders rushed to help this week after two 10-year-old boys started falling through the ice on a Coquitlam lake.
Mitch Muir, whose home is on the waterfront, told CTV News he first spotted one of the boys while working from home on Thursday.
“I realized there was a second child and he’d actually fallen through the ice. I just saw his head pop up out of the water," Muir said.
The Good Samaritan sprang into action while his neighbour was trying to reach them on a kayak.
“I grabbed my ladder and I ran around to the other side to the beach,” he told CTV News.
A man walking his dog also stopped to help, and Muir says they both jumped into the lake together.
The ice was too weak to hold them, so “we spread the ladder out onto the lake and we just sort of shimmied our way out there as best we could,” Muir explained.
"It was kind of getting desperate there for a bit,” he recounted. “[The boy] was sort of struggling and I guess the ice was kind of breaking around him."
The child managed to grab a rung of the ladder and they pulled him to safety. The other boy was already back on dry land.
By the time first responders arrived both children were on shore, thanks to efforts the RCMP described as "heroic." The boys were taken to hospital to be checked for hypothermia and shock.
Muir said he wouldn’t have been able to do it alone.
“It was a group effort," he said.
