HAMMOND - A Hammond woman’s quest to identify a state trooper who helped dig her car out of the snow last week has come to an end.

Last week, Ttrooper Christopher R. Woodcock, 33, said he was on patrol in Hammond when he saw a woman holding a shovel in one hand and a cane in the other.

The woman, Virginia “Jennie” L. Youngs, was struggling to shovel snow off her car outside her home on River Ledge Road.

Mr. Woodcock, who has been a state trooper for six years, said he didn’t think twice about stopping.

“It’s one of the things we are trained to do in situations like this,” he said. “It’s something we’re always prepared to do. A lot of us do this kind of thing.”

Mrs. Youngs was cleaning her car so that she could go to the emergency room to be treated for bronchitis and the flu.

“I asked her if she wanted me to call an ambulance or the rescue squad, but she didn’t want to inconvenience anyone,” Mr. Woodcock said. “That’s just the kind of woman she is.”

Mr. Woodcock cleared the almost two feet of snow from around her vehicle, which had been blocked in from a passing snow plow.

“I just told her to get in her car and get warm,” he said.

A resident of Morristown, Mr. Woodcock has lived in the north country his whole life, except from 1997 to 2002, when he served in the U.S. Marine Corps immediately after graduating from high school.

He said he enjoys being a state trooper because it allows him to be a community leader.

But he said he never expected he would get such a personal recognition like the one he received from Mrs. Youngs.

“I appreciated it,” he said. “It was totally unexpected. You don’t think about getting recognition when you do something like that. She just needed help. To be honest, it shouldn’t even be newsworthy. It should just be commonplace that we help the people who need help.”

Thousands of readers like you have made Northern New York Newspapers the number one ranked website* for local news and sports coverage in the north country.

You can continue on to this article in a few seconds, or you can visit one of our websites:

• Watertown Daily Times
• The Ogdensburg Journal
• Daily Courier-Observer