Stories Of Kindness, Compassion Emerge From Frenetic Pre-Winter Snowstorm
AT-A-GLANCE
NEW ROCHELLE (CBSNewYork) - Now that Thursday night's snow and chaos are gone, tales of kindness and strangers helping one another during the storm are being shared.
One such story has a young mother searching for a family that helped rescue her and her baby.
Alexandra Alexin of is happy to see her car is safe after a rough night with her 15-month-old son.
"It's still here," she said of her vehicle. "You freak out last night? Because mommy was freaking out."
The New Rochelle mom left work early to pick her child up from daycare. She was hoping to beat the storm, but that idea didn't pan out. She was caught like everyone else.
"I was panicked, complete and utter panic," said Alexin.
Quickly falling ice and snow covered her neighborhood roads.
"Unfortunately, the only two routes we could take, I couldn't make it up the hills with my car," she said. "So I was spinning out in the middle of the road, freaking out with him in the back seat."
She drove her car to the closest safe place she could find: a local shopping plaza.
"I went into the grocery store because at least it was nice and warm and had food," she said.
Her husband was stuck in traffic too. It took him five and half hours to get home from the Bronx. Neighbors and friends couldn't make it to her either, so she was trapped with her son.
"I ended up being in the grocery store in tears and luckily, this incredible family, they stopped and asked me what was wrong," Alexin said.
That family were complete strangers offering them a ride home, out of their way home in a snow storm they weren't prepared for.
"They got me through these horrendous streets and they got the two of us home and it was phenomenal," said Alexin.
The mom is now searching for this anonymous family so she can relay a message: "I would love to tell them thank you, and that I am forever in their debt. They are the type of people that I want to believe our community is full of."
In nearby Yonkers. firefighters battled conditions to make a housecall and deliver a baby. In New Jersey, a man in Maplewood says a local pizzeria drove his pregnant wife home in the storm while he was stuck at Penn Station.
"To see a lady walk in pregnant who's going to be a mother, it made me think that she's got to get home safe," Sabatino Perrotta, owner of Sabatino's Pizzeria, said.
These stories just go to show that sometimes when circumstances are at their worst, people rise to the occasion to be their best.