He caught a mucky break.
A Long Island hiker who sank into a freezing, chest-high mud pit while chasing after his dog last week thanked the cop who rescued him at a heartfelt reunion Wednesday — saying he panicked when he “couldn’t feel my face.”
Kyle Prato, 24, a paramedic from Medford, praised the Suffolk County cops who trudged 3 miles into Blydenburgh County Park to save him Thursday — including Officer Richard Esposito, who pulled him from the recently drained Stump Pond.
“I feel nothing but thanks because if it wasn’t for him, I might have sank further, and I’m not sure how that would have gone — but I’m very grateful,” Prato said at a press event Wednesday afternoon.
“It was cold, very cold. I couldn’t feel my face, couldn’t barely feel my lips, my legs.”
Prato was taking his 7-month-old Austrian Shepherd, Stryker, on a frigid trek through the vast greenspace in Smithtown when the pup darted into the massive mud puddle and got stuck.
“I was trying to hold on to a frozen piece of dirt, but once a piece of dirt thawed, that’s when I kind of sank a little further,” Prato said, adding it took roughly 40 minutes for police to find him. “By that time, I went from my knees to my waist.”
“Once the helicopter spotted me, I kind of felt more relieved,” he said.
As roughly a dozen officers searched for him, Esposito spotted him in the quicksand-like pit and sprang to action.
“I’m not gonna let him sit in there, so I made my way out,” Esposito recalled. “‘He said, ‘Don’t get too close,’ but once I got about a foot or two from him, I went down with him,” the cop said at the event, held at Suffolk County Executive’s Office.
“We laughed for a second, but I was able to shimmy out and grab him by the arm and just pull him out,” Esposito said.
At the reunion, staged for media by Suffolk County Police Department, Prato shook Esposito’s hand and said “thank you” with a smile as Stryker bounded around gleefully, mugging for cameras.
The dog ultimately emerged from the mud unscathed long before his owner’s narrow escape, Prato said.
“For the most part of it, [Stryker] was just running around in circles, having the time of his life,” Prato said. “And then towards the end, is when he took a seat right next to me.”
“I think he realized something was going on,” he said. “But for the most part, he was just enjoying himself.”
