BOSTON (WCVB/CNN) – After a Maine family missed their train, a Boston police officer drove them two hours home to make sure a postoperative 19-year-old didn’t have to wait in the cold.
The Malenfant family headed home to Portland, ME, Saturday after being in New York City about a week and a half for 19-year-old Kori to undergo brain surgery.
But weather delays caused by single digit temperatures meant they ended up missing their train out of Boston’s North Station by five minutes.
Exhausted, the Malenfants only wanted to find a place to store their luggage as they waited the two to three hours for the next train, so they asked some officers for help.
Capt. Kelley McCormick was one of those officers, who were getting ready to work security detail at the Boston Bruins hockey game.
McCormick says he didn’t want the family, especially Kori, to have to sit waiting in the cold.
“They looked tired. She looked cold and very frail,” McCormick said.
The police captain knows just how difficult post-op can be because his wife is a transplant recipient, having received a kidney from her husband.
“I’ve been through the medical stuff with a lot of disappointments, a lot of highs and lows,” McCormick said.
So, McCormick loaded the family into his cruiser, saying they could stay with him as he went to get gas.
But after gassing up, he kept driving.
“We got to about Lynnfield [a half hour drive] where she realized, and she goes, ‘Are you driving us to Portland?’ I said, ‘Yes, this is a kidnapping, but it's legal,’” McCormick said.
Kori Malenfant says she and her family were so thankful, they couldn’t even speak.
Two hours later, the family was back home in Maine.
“It's like we just got a break from all the worry we'd been experiencing about we just need to get our daughter closer to home. It was so much more than we ever could have imagined,” said Wendi Malenfant, Kori’s mother.
After driving the family home, McCormick was able to get back to Boston and report for duty at the Bruins game.
Copyright 2018 WCVB, Malenfant Family via CNN. All rights reserved.
