CAMP SMITH TRAINING SITE, N.Y. —
National Guard members spend countless hours every year training for the next big mission. For Army Spc. Nicole McKenzie, that mission wasn't overseas — it was just below an overpass on her way home from the Yonkers armory on Aug. 3.
McKenzie, a cable systems installer and maintainer with Company A, 101st Signal Battalion, New York Army National Guard, saw a flash of red going over a guardrail on the Saw Mill River Parkway and immediately pulled her car to the side of the road.
“I saw what looked like the outline of a boy going over the side,” McKenzie said. “I knew something was wrong.”
Her instincts had been sharpened by nearly six years of Army training, which erased all doubt and hesitation at the scene.
“Thanks to my Army training, it was all automatic; everything was fluid,” McKenzie said.
She ran over to the edge where she saw Police Officer Jessie Ferreira Cavallo, of the Hastings-on-Hudson police department already assessing the scene.
Teamwork
When McKenzie saw the 12-year-old boy lying on the rocks below, she shouted to Cavallo, “Let's go!” They both ran to the shallow end of the overpass, climbed over a fence, and dropped 10 feet to the jagged ground below.
The boy, a resident of the Bronx, had left the Andrus campus in the Bronx. Andrus is a private, nonprofit…
