#Vermont farmer finds double amputee skydiver’s lost prosthetic leg

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Farmer Joe Marszalkowski (right) and double amputee Chris Marckres (left)
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A double amputee skydiver from Vermont has been reunited with a prosthetic leg he lost during a jump – thanks to an eagle-eyed farmer who spotted the limb in his soybean field, according to a report.

Chris Marckres, of Hyde Park, leaped out of a plane Saturday at Vermont Skydiving Adventures in West Addison, but one of his prosthetic legs took a dive of its own, NECN and NBC10 Boston reported.

“I think my adrenaline was so high and I was just so excited, I didn’t realize I had lost it,” Marckres said in a phone interview Monday.

He was harnessed to an instructor for the tandem jump and landed safely with his remaining prosthetic leg – but he really wanted to find the other one because a replacement would be very pricey.

So he plunged into an effort to track it down by calling on people in the area on Facebook to keep their eyes out for his leg.

Farmer Joe Marszalkowski noticed the unusual post and discovered the slightly scratched but otherwise undamaged prosthetic on Sunday in the soybean field.

“You’ve always got to keep an eye out,” Marszalkowski said. “It was literally a needle in a haystack as far as trying to find it.”

He added: “I was very grateful to have found it without running it over with a machine this fall during harvest — or, God forbid, the combine sucked it up. It would’ve destroyed it.”

Marckres called the successful search “a positive experience.”

“I can’t thank everybody enough, especially Joe. We kind of take for granted sometimes how many truly good people there still are in the world,” he said.

Even though Marckres offered a reward, Marszalkowski told NECN and NBC10 Boston that just knowing he helped out a fellow Vermonter was rewarding enough.