An NYPD detective who once helped corner a 425-pound tiger inside a Harlem apartment found himself talking down a different kind of crisis this month, pulling a woman threatening suicide back over a pier railing on the Hudson River. Emergency Service Detective Marty Duffy and his partner, Detective John Medina, responded to a 911 call about a woman standing on the outside ledge of a pier at West 125th Street, and together they got her into custody before she could go into the water.
The woman had climbed onto the ledge at the pier near the Hudson River, according to New York Post, which first reported the rescue. Medina worked to get the woman talking, and Duffy told the outlet the woman said to him, “I’m suicidal” and “my god is telling me to kill myself.” At one point, amid the wind off the water, Duffy told her, “I’m very sorry. I didn’t catch your name because of the wind,” according to the same account. The two detectives eventually pulled the woman over the railing and into custody, keeping her from falling into the river.
The pier sits inside West Harlem Piers Park, a two-acre waterfront space at West 125th Street and Marginal Street that opened in May 2009 after the city transformed an abandoned industrial lot and former ferry slip into public parkland, according to WE ACT for Environmental Justice. Duffy said the officers acted the moment an opportunity arose to save the woman's life, per the Post's reporting.
A Detective With a Famous Rescue in His Past
Duffy serves with NYPD Emergency Service Unit Truck 2, which covers Manhattan north of 59th Street and, per the same account, handles everything from crimes and water-related jobs to emotionally disturbed person calls like the one on the pier. Truck 2 operates out of the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street, putting its quarters just a block from where this rescue happened, according to N2NOV. NYPD Patrol Guide procedure 221-13 requires officers to call in the Emergency Service Unit and set up a safety perimeter whenever someone in crisis poses a threat of serious self-harm, according to a class-action complaint filed by the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which is exactly the kind of call that brought Duffy and Medina to the pier.
Duffy has nearly three decades on the job, following his father into an NYPD detective's shield and carrying that same shield number, per the Post's reporting. But he is best known for a very different rescue, back in October 2003, when he and fellow officers responded to reports of a tiger inside an apartment at the Drew Hamilton Houses in East Harlem.
The Ming the Tiger Case That Made Duffy Famous
That case began when the tiger's owner, Antoine Yates, went to a hospital claiming a pit bull had bitten his leg. Doctors determined the wound was not a dog bite, and once that distinction was made, police went to the Drew Hamilton Houses apartment, according to vindyarchives.com. Officers cut holes in the wall of an adjoining apartment to locate the animal, then planned to lower Duffy and another officer from outside the building to dart it; Duffy was lowered from the seventh floor down to the fifth, where the tiger was being kept, per the Post's account.
Inside, officers found far more than one animal. NYPD officers discovered a 425-pound tiger named Ming along with a five-foot caiman alligator named Al kept in another bedroom of the fifth-floor apartment, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The Post's own account of the 2003 operation put Ming's weight closer to 400 pounds and identified him as a Bengal tiger. Duffy darted Ming successfully, and the tiger was transported to an animal sanctuary in Ohio, Duffy told the Post.
What Happened to Ming, and the Legal Fallout for His Owner
Ming lived out his remaining years at Noah's Lost Ark animal sanctuary in Berlin Center, Ohio, for 16 years before dying of natural causes in February 2019 at around 19 years old, Smithsonian Magazine reported. Yates faced serious consequences for keeping the animals: in December 2004 he was sentenced to five months in prison and five years of probation after pleading guilty to felony reckless endangerment, having kept wild animals in a residential apartment where children lived, according to the Laconia Daily Sun, which cited wire reporting noting that up to eight children had lived in or visited the apartment while the animals were present. Article 161.01 of the New York City Health Code bars private individuals from keeping wild or exotic animals within city limits, a category that includes non-domesticated big cats and crocodilians such as alligators, according to the NYC Health Department.
Truck 2's Dual Mission, From Exotic Animals to Crisis Calls
The Ming case and the pier rescue sit at opposite ends of the same job description for ESU Truck 2, a unit founded in April 1930 and recognized as the oldest police SWAT and technical rescue unit in the country, now operating across 10 specialized squad trucks with roughly 330 members department-wide, according to Wikipedia. Truck 2 also carries a somber history: the unit lost 14 of its members during rescue operations at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, out of 23 total NYPD officers killed that day, Hoodline previously reported in coverage of a 9/11 hero's son making sergeant.
This month's pier rescue is the latest in a string of ESU crisis interventions across the city's waterways. Hoodline has reported on NYPD officers lowering themselves onto a bridge ledge to save a 19-year-old in a Williamsburg Bridge rescue earlier this month, and on a cable rescue that saved a woman perched over the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge last month. Jet skiers also pulled a teenager from the East River moments after a jump from the Brooklyn Bridge, underscoring how frequently the department's emergency responders are called to the water. The outcome of the pier rescue woman's mental health evaluation has not been reported.
