Dramatic rescue in Rockford flood: ‘We didn’t give him a chance to decide’

June 20--Mark Pickett and his friend Ryan Craig were just trying to see how badly the area around their homes was flooding from heavy rains Monday evening when they pulled into the parking lot of Rockford Plaza shopping center on the southeast side of the city.

Bruce Salley, meanwhile, was waiting out the intense downpour at a nearby McDonald's, but it was getting late. He hopped in his 2005 Cadillac DeVille and started driving away.

Soon, the men's lives became linked in a life-or-death struggle, with Pickett and Craig trying to rescue the 70-year-old Salley from his car as it was slowly being pulled into the flood-swollen waters of Keith Creek.

When it was all over, Salley, a Rockford mortician and funeral director, had been saved through the heroics of Pickett, Craig and another unidentified man.

"The thing is, everybody will die," Salley, a lifelong Rockford resident, said Tuesday. "Stuff happens, even to morticians, but it wasn't my time. It could have been, but it wasn't."

Rockford was socked with up to 5 inches of rain in a four-hour period Monday evening. Pickett and Craig, along with Pickett's daughter, Brianna Pickett, had helped a couple of other motorists whose cars had stalled in the flooded parking lot near Charles Street and Hunter Avenue, but their attention was soon drawn to the Cadillac that was trying to cross over a bridge completely overrun by fast-moving flood waters.

"I guess he thought he was gonna drive through (the water)," Pickett said of Salley in a telephone interview Tuesday. "He didn't know what he was getting himself into."

Pickett and Craig watched as the massive car began floating, and then became lodged against a guardrail and slowly started to sink.

"I heard it hit something," Salley said.

There was the fear the vehicle would become dislodged or totally submerged in the rising water. Amid the rushing brown water, Salley thought he might end up becoming a client at one of the funeral homes where he works.

Compounding the danger was the fact that a short distance downstream, Keith Creek enters an underground viaduct and does not re-emerge for several hundred yards.

Pickett and Craig got out of the pickup truck they were in and made their way to the stricken Cadillac.

"We didn't say a word to each other," Craig said. "We didn't know what we were doing. We just had to do something."

The pair, along with another man whom they didn't know, jumped onto the trunk of the car and began breaking windows to try and get Salley to safety. But the driver was reluctant to leave, for fear of being cut by the broken glass, they said.

"He kept saying, 'I don't want to get cut,' " Pickett said. "Finally, I told him, 'Look, buddy, you've got two choices: You either climb out this back window and get cut, or you're gonna drown.' "

"When he stuck his arms out, Mark grabbed one and I grabbed the other," Craig chimed in. "We didn't give him a chance to decide."

During the rescue attempt, Salley's foot got caught between the driver's and passenger's seats, and he endured a few scratches and cuts on his right hand and arms.

"When they were taking me out, they were wearing out," Salley said. "I was wearing out, but if I let go, I was dead.

"One of them said, 'We gotta get you out of here or we're both going to drown,' " Salley recalled.

By then, the car had begun sinking rapidly, and when the men stepped off the trunk, the vehicle rolled on its side, briefly pinning Craig's leg against the guardrail. But they were able to push it away, and Pickett waded through the current to his pickup truck, where he grabbed a length of tow strap that they used to haul themselves back to safety.

Meanwhile, Brianna Pickett was filming the harrowing events from the cabin of her father's pickup.

"There were a lot of bad words," she said. "I never intended to go viral. I had been recording way before that. It just all happened so fast. I didn't even know what to say, what to do, what to think. I was just scared as hell because of that drainage ditch. I was so scared they were going to go in."

After he was placed in one of the men's pickups, Salley said they declined his offers to give them something to show his appreciation.

Salley was treated for minor injuries at SwedishAmerican hospital, and then got a ride home from a hospital staffer.

"I went home," he said, "I thanked God and I went to sleep, because you need your sleep."

Salley said the experience deepened his faith and showed that "we're not in charge."

He also said the experience has made him stronger.

"You have to be grateful you survived," he added.

Salley lost a car, but his cellphone, wallet and house keys stayed in the pocket of his shorts.

On Tuesday, he was notifying friends, and contacting his insurance and cellphone companies. When he stopped for lunch at one of his favorite places, Stockholm Inn, people recognized him from news accounts. Salley joked that his fame might lead to a spot on the "Wheel of Fortune" TV show.

Pickett said that earlier Monday, he had been at the grave of his father, who died last Labor Day. Monday would have been his birthday.

"I went to his grave and did a Facebook Live video of me singing 'Happy Birthday' to him in the rainstorm," Pickett said. "And I left out of there and it was just like chaos."

Pickett, 47, is the owner of Gary's Auto Sales in Rockford, and Craig, 33, is a salesman for Rock Valley Culligan, but both said they took a much-needed day off Tuesday to recover from the events of the previous night.

Craig was nursing his hands after receiving more than a dozen stitches to close the cut he suffered while trying to break out the rear window, and both men said they had a hard time sleeping.

"Last night I couldn't go to sleep," Pickett said. "My mind was racing a thousand miles an hour, just going through everything. It's a bit overwhelming."

And on Tuesday, they were dealing with the surreal experience of hearing their names on the radio, and fielding calls for interviews from media from across the country.

"We got woke up early this morning," Pickett said. "The news outlets were there at the scene and wanted us to go down there with them."

Then there was the message Brianna got from her alderman that the mayor wanted to see them, and news that someone wanted to give them an award.

And of course, there were the calls asking them to sell the rights to the video Brianna shot.

"We're not selling it," Mark Pickett said. "We didn't do this to get money."

Matthew Walberg reported from Chicago.

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