Smithtown man a life-saver on NYPD team

A day in the life of Smithtown resident and New York City police officer Benjamin Kalinsky finds him scaling the Brooklyn Bridge, swimming in the East River or working a parade on Fifth Avenue.

Kalinsky, a detective with the NYPD's elite Emergency Services Unit, has saved lives in several high-profile incidents, including last week's helicopter crash in the East River. He called the feats second nature.

"You just go into action," he said Tuesday. "We're trained for it. It's just something that we do."

Kalinsky and his partner, Det. Robert Chocallo, on Monday used a defibrillator to resuscitate a marcher in cardiac arrest at the Columbus Day Parade.

"We shocked him three times in the street. His breathing was very labored," recounted Kalinsky, who turns 41 Friday. "We worked on him in the ambulance en route to the hospital . . . and got a pulse back."

The Canadian victim, 85, was in stable condition, police officials said Thursday.

Kalinsky, raised in Plainview and a married father of four, began his NYPD career 20 years ago as a transit cop. For more than seven years he has been a member of the Emergency Services Unit, which requires rigorous tactical training.

Kalinsky and his colleagues are also skilled scuba divers and regularly conduct climbing exercises to train to rescue people from the Brooklyn Bridge. "It goes from one extreme to the next," he said.

Their underwater experience came in handy last week when a helicopter lifting off from the East 34th Street Heliport with tourists crashed into the East River.

"I put on my dry suit -- my scuba-diving suit and life jacket -- and I jumped in," Kalinsky said. He helped other emergency responders pass one female victim up a ladder to the shore and another to an FDNY rescue boat. "The waters were really rough. There was definitely a really strong current that day."

A third female passenger died in the crash, but her family last Friday extended a "heartfelt thank you" to rescuers. One of the two women Kalinsky helped rescue succumbed to her injuries and was pronounced dead Tuesday. The helicopter pilot and a male passenger survived the crash.

Kalinsky and colleagues had been in the middle of a counterterrorism exercise when called to the Kips Bay crash scene.

"We had heavy weapons and tactical gear on, which we had to shed obviously before we went in the water," Lt. Larry Serras, 45, of Lindenhurst, said at the scene.

The helicopter incident was another of Kalinsky's water rescues.

In May 2010, a woman tossed her 19-month-old daughter into the Hudson River and then plunged in after the girl in what police said was a murder-suicide attempt.

Kalinsky got the dispatch, rushed to the Upper West Side site and took over lifesaving CPR on the toddler from a harbor unit cop.

"I was actually just in the area. I just happened to be nearby," Kalinsky remembered. The woman and the girl survived.

Fate seems a theme in his heroic career. He recalled a time last year when he and a partner resuscitated a middle-aged man on the Upper East Side. "We were in the right spot at the right time when the patrol officers were calling over the radio for a defibrillator," he said."Working as a police officer, there is a lot of negativity," he said. "It is nice to once in a while do something good that does have a positive outcome."