By Olivia Scheck
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Tough times may still lie ahead for the Lower East Side man who survived four days in a swamp before being rescued last week.
State Senior Investigator Gary Mazzacano, who discovered Thomas Wopat-Moreau last Thursday, noted that the 22-year-old was unable to move his lower extremities when he visited him in the hospital on Friday.
However, in her first public comments since the accident, Wopat-Moreau's mother Christine told an upstate paper that her son's condition was improving and that she expected a full recovery.
"He is remarkably well, considering what he's been through," she said, according to the Journal News. "He's transitioning from one kind of pain to another, the damage pain to the healing pain. So that's what he's doing now, with the same kind of courage that he used to save his life. He's a strong guy."
The crash victim's mom did not say whether her son had regained use of his legs in the Journal News article, though she did note that he had undergone surgery on Monday to stabilize back injuries sustained in the crash.
"It's a process; It's going to be a long process," she told the paper.
Wopat-Moreau spent four days in a swamp beside the Taconic State Parkway after an accident sent his vehicle flying nearly 500 feet from the road.
The ordeal began early Sunday morning, when Wopat-Moreau left a party in Stormville, N.Y., for his mother’s home in Copake, N.Y., Mazzacano said.
The drive should have taken a little more than an hour, according to an online map search.
However, shortly after 4 a.m., Wopat-Moreau told police he encountered a deer in the road. Instead of breaking, he accelerated and swerved, hitting a guardrail and flying 480 feet into a swamp, Mazzacano said.
The car landed upside-down, but Wopat-Moreau miraculously survived.
His mother, meanwhile, filed a missing person’s report with upstate police and began scouring the roads, accompanied by friends and family, Mazzacano said.
The desperate manhunt continued for days, but it wasn’t until Thursday that rescuers caught a break by finding cell phone records placing Wopat-Moreau within a certain section of the parkway before the crash, Mazzacano explained.
Using the cell phone information, police narrowed Wopat-Moreau’s location to a 3-mile radius and dispatched people to survey the area, the investigator said.
Then, around 2 p.m. Thursday, one of the dispatched troopers, officer Ronald Cardis, noticed what he believed to be remnants of a recent accident — a mirror from a German-made car and debris matching the color of Wopat-Moreau’s BMW, according to Mazzacano.
The officer called Mazzacano to the scene, and they began to search the brush nearby.
As they waded through the untamed plants, some “seven or eight feet high,” Mazzacano recalled, they came upon a letter addressed to Wopat-Moreau.
At that point they knew they were in the right place, but Mazzacano said they still “feared the worst.”
Then, to the investigator’s disbelief, he heard a voice.
“I heard somebody yelling, and I couldn’t believe it,” Mazzacano said. “I yelled, ‘Thomas is that you.’ He says ‘Yes,’ and I said, 'Keep yelling so that we can find you.”
When they finally discovered him, Wopat-Moreau was in “terrible shape,” the investigator noted.
“He had injured himself so that he couldn’t move his legs,” Mazzacano recalled of the tragic scene. “I had to sweep bugs from his mouth and face.”
Later, Wopat-Moreau told police that he had tried drinking swamp water in order to stave off dehydration. “But it made him sick so he stopped doing that,” turning instead to the plants that surrounded him, Mazzacano said.
“He actually broke off some of that leafy elephant grass… and he actually tried to survive on that,” the investigator added.
Regardless, Mazzacano noted that the resourceful graduate of the College of William and Mary was in high spirits when he visited him on Friday.
“He was happy to be alive,” Mazzacano said. “He has a very strong will to live, this young man.”
