Family, friends mourning loss of FDNY Firefighter Mark Batista, who drowned trying to save daughter
TEANECK, N.J. -- Family, friends and the FDNY are mourning the loss of one of their own.
Mark Anthony Batista lost his life trying to save his own daughter in the water on the Jersey Shore.
Batista was just 39 year old, an FDNY firefighter with Engine 226 in Brooklyn with so much promise.
"He was always happy. He was always helpful," neighbor Dalais Sanchez said.
That's how Sanchez remembers the father of three, who went by Anthony and spent 15 years with the FDNY as an EMT and firefighter.
"Great father. What can say? Nothing bad I can say," she said.
She was still trembling as she tried to find the words and recalled the text she received on Friday from Batista's wife that changed everything.
"Anthony went to the beach with the kids, and they cannot find the daughter. My heart dropped," Sanchez said.
It was Friday morning when crews at Avon-by-the-Sea searched the ocean moments after Batista jumped into the water to save his daughter. She got swept away by a jetty and caught in a rip current. Shortly, crews rescued the girl. Batista was found an hour later. He didn't make it.
Sanchez got the grim news from his heartbroken wife.
"When I called her an hour later, we started crying. She says, 'I lost him, I lost him. What am I gonna do? I lost him. Dalais, I lost him. It's Anthony,'" she said.
With no lifeguards on duty, this father did everything in his power to save his little girl.
"And it's deceptive because it looks so calm, but you don't see the undertow," Bob Zielinski, of Bradley Beach, said Friday.
Even though Batista wasn't a fan of the beach, it was a promise he made to his daughter.
"He went out the night before, and he was tired, but he said, 'I promised to take her to the beach,' and he decides to take her to the beach," Sanchez said.
Rescuing was in his blood, and even until this last day, it was his own blood that he saved.
