BREWER, Maine — At first, Bangor resident Neal Call thought he heard the distant howl of a feline Sunday morning, but after doing a little investigating he discovered an injured woman on the ledges located under Indian Trail Park across the river.
“I was playing video games and I heard her,” Call said after Brewer resident Brianna Parsons had been rescued. “I thought it was a cat. I thought it was a cat until she said, ‘please help.’ Then I knew it wasn’t a cat. It was crazy.”
Call walked out behind his Hancock Street home in Bangor and down over the steep embankment behind it before he realized the injured woman was across the Penobscot River.
He immediately called 911 on his cellphone.
“They couldn’t hear me on 911 it was such a steep hill. I ran to the top. I had to go to the top [to get cell service],” the good Samaritan said. “That was some crazy activity for the day.”
After he got through to 911, at about 10:20 a.m., he drove to Indian Trail Park and arrived just before Brewer police, fire and ambulance crews.
“People were in the parking lot and everything and didn’t hear anything … it’s such a steep cliff,” Call said, describing the area just below the park where he located Parsons.
Parsons was out walking her three dogs when one, named Emmy, got free and fell into the water. She tied up the other two, Lola and McKinley, to a tree near a bench that overlooks the water and dropped her cellphone and shoes on the trail and went after her dog. Somehow she slipped and fell onto the ledges along the river.
Brewer firefighters and Capital Ambulance personnel climbed down to the ledge and secured her arm and gave her pain medication, and also allowed her to borrow a phone to call her mother who lives nearby. When her mother and stepfather arrived, Parsons said she broke her arm in the fall and told them to “just take care of my dogs.”
She was rescued from the ledge by a Bangor Fire Department boat that took her to a waiting ambulance for her trip to Eastern Maine Medical Center.
Emmy, who was missing for a time after her swim, was located just downriver at about 11:45 a.m. and reunited with her family.