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After Four Days In Upstate Ravine, NYC Man Found Alive
By
Jen Chung
Published Jun 4, 2010
Modified Jun 4, 2010
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By
Jen Chung
Published Jun 4, 2010
Modified Jun 4, 2010
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For four days, friends and family had been searching for Thomas Wopat-Moreau, a 22-year-old East Village resident who went missing after leaving a party in Dutchess County. A friend said, "I think he tried to go home and something happened on the way. An entire car vanished, it’s not just a person. No one’s seen either." And what happened was he lost control of his car and crashed off the Taconic State Parkway about 40 miles outside of Albany, landing 480 feet from the highway.
Wopat-Moreau was planning on stay the night in East Fishkill before heading up to his mother's house in Copake, NY, but left the party around 3 or 4 a.m. Sunday morning after reportedly getting into an argument with someone. His mother reported him missing later in the day and his friends started to search his possible routes. The Poughkeepsie Journal reports that yesterday a state trooper "saw some rubber stuck to a post along the parkway," so he went to inspect in the woods and found "Wopat-Moreau's 2005 BMW silver wagon down an embankment, upside down and 'completely demolished.'" Police aviation units couldn't see it because it was hidden by a tree.
It's believed he crawled out of the car's window (he got 150 feet away from the car) and survived without food or water for days—well, his uncle said he was drinking "swamp water." Senior Investigator Gary Mazzacano told the Daily News, "He was very relieved to have been found. He was in pretty tough shape. He was dehydrated; he was unable to move his lower extremities; he was covered in insects." Mazzacano also said that even though Wopat-Moreau's phone was dead, police were able to narrow his location to a 3-mile radius based on cell records.
Wopat-Moreau, who was scheduled to start a job at Barclays on Tuesday, remains hospitalized. State Police Capt. Scott Brown said that while he was in "rough shape," he was "cautiously optimistic" that Wopat-Moreau would "survive. He had an extreme will to live."
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Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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