A 77-year-old woman died after her car rolled from a gym parking lot into a Pennsylvania river, according to police.
The woman, who has not been identified, was pulled from the Schuylkill River on Tuesday morning in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Emergency crews were called to Righter’s Ferry Road around 9am on Tuesday after police learned that a car leaving a gym has crashed in the parking lot, then backed up over the edge of an embankment before rolling down into the river below.
A pair of Merion Police officers as well as a Union Fire Company firefighter and a fitness trainer from the nearby AFC Fitness gym jumped into the river in an attempt to save the driver. They managed to pull her out of her SUV and drag her back onto shore.
She was then transported to Lankenau Hospital where police say she later died.
The first responders were also taken to the hospital for examination, and all were released later the same day.
A customer at the gym told Fox29 that he was pulling just as the emergency responders were arriving, and initially feared that a mass shooting had occurred.
“Nine o’clock, we were pulling into the gym and there were all these emergency vehicles behind me and I was impressed with the amount of them,” Ed Ruback, the customer, told the outlet. “My first thought was, ‘Oh God, I hope it’s not an active shooter.’”
Ruback says he is fairly certain the woman who died was a regular at the gym.
Another witness to the rescue described the emergency response as “pandemonium.”
“I just saw mass pandemonium. There were fire trucks, helicopters, rescue vehicles, boats, all that stuff,” John Paul, a local resident, told ABC 6.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, several cars have fallen into the river this year. Authorities had to pull three cars from the river in Sepember alone.
