“I don’t know what I can do to repay Kevin for what he has done,” Eric Green told PEOPLE in 2006
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/frozen-lake-092426-6d93ffaf8426489cbc76f81694a0ecb2.jpg "This is a photo on the frozen lake Winkelbergsee in the Austrian province of Tyrol in the winter with fog.")
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NEED TO KNOW
- Over 20 years ago, Eric Green fell through a frozen canal in New Jersey while trying to save his dog, Copper
- Kevin Phillips spotted them and risked his own safety to pull them both from the water
- The rescue brought Green and Phillips together, and the two later became friends, according to a 2006 PEOPLE story
It was a cold winter day when Eric Green took his Bernese Mountain Dog, Copper, for a walk near the frozen Delaware and Raritan Canal in rural Hopewell, N.J., over 20 years ago.
He had no reason to expect anything unusual from the outing until Copper spotted ducks nearby, ran toward them and plunged through the ice. Green went after the pup, only to find himself in the freezing canal with no solid ground beneath him and no one nearby to hear him.
As he grew weak and numb after 15 minutes in the water, Green realized that he “couldn’t touch the bottom.”
“I was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to die,’” he told PEOPLE in October 2006.
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Green, then 27 and a rubber products salesman, soon found himself struggling to stay above water.
Luckily, Kevin Phillips, then 36 and a security company manager, was driving along Route 29 when he noticed something in the canal.
He pulled over and realized that Copper was not alone in the water. “I saw a dog sticking out of the canal – then somebody’s hand,” Phillips recalled to PEOPLE.
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After wading into the canal to get the two, Phillips realized the current was too strong. So instead, he drove to the other side and tried to toss Green a rope, only to learn that Green’s “hands were frozen,” so he “couldn’t keep hold.”
On his third attempt, Phillips tied the tow rope — which he had put in his pickup only days earlier — to his truck and then around his waist. He then pulled Green to shore before going back for Copper.
Explaining why he had risked going into the canal again, Phillips told PEOPLE, “I would’ve done it for the dog alone.”
While Green and Copper recovered, the stranger who saved them became a friend. The two men, who lived about 100 miles apart at the time, began visiting occasionally and exchanging e-mails several times a week.
For Green, though, friendship could not erase what Phillips had done for him and Copper.
“I don’t know what I can do to repay Kevin for what he has done,” Green told PEOPLE at the time.
