Cop, Bravest husband save disabled woman from train crash

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Cop, Bravest husband save disabled woman from train crash

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BY PETE DONOHUE, ETHAN ROUEN and BILL HUTCHINSON

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Friday, November 9th 2007, 4:00 AM

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Randi (L.) and Anthony LoCicero arrived seconds before a LIRR smashup.

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An off-duty NYPD cop and her husband, a volunteer firefighter, teamed up Thursday night to pull a disabled Queens woman from her car just seconds before it was slammed by a Long Island Rail Road train.

Officer Randi LoCicero and her husband, Anthony, chief of the Franklin Square, L.I., volunteer fire department, were being hailed for their quick and courageous rescue.

"It was a remarkable response by these two heroes, who used all their training to quickly evacuate the woman from the car and save her life," said Susan McGowan, a spokeswoman for the LIRR.

The heart-pounding drama began about 5:40 p.m., when Patricia Rech, 63, of Floral Park, accidently drove her 2004 silver Buick sedan onto the tracks at the Roslyn Road railroad crossing in Mineola, officials said. The LoCiceros were stuck in traffic in his fire chief's truck when they were flagged down and alerted to the pending disaster.

"We jumped out of our car and started running," Randi LoCicero, 34, a member of the NYPD since 1997, told the Daily News.

As LoCicero and her 33-year-old husband raced to the stuck car, the gates of the railroad crossing started coming down.

"We grabbed the lady, and she said, 'I can't walk without my crutches.' We just grabbed her and started dragging her down the street," said Randi LoCicero, who is assigned to the NYPD's gun range on City Island.

As the westbound Ronkonkoma-to-Penn Station train bore down on them, Anthony LoCicero radioed his fire dispatcher to see if it could be stopped - it couldn't.

The dynamic duo managed to pull Rech to safety just as the train barreled into the car, flipping it over and dragging it nearly 100 feet down the tracks, officials said.

"Within 10 seconds the train slammed into the car," Randi LoCicero said. "We usually always get there after the fact, not when it's happening."

With Michael White