Toronto police are once again warning people to stay off frozen bodies of water after a teenager fell through the ice over the weekend.

Officers say the incident happened in front of their marine unit station on Queens Quay West on Saturday evening.

Jerry Collins, a man who was at the Harbourfront at the time the incident happened, rushed over when he heard people screaming for help.

“I ran out, crawled out the last of the ways to them, was able to hook on them through the shoulder and them got him up to the ice, had him kick as hard as he could, bring his body up to the edge,” said Collins.

Officers attended to the 15-year-old boy who eventually went home on his own– escaping a situation that could have been fatal.

Toronto police tell CityNews this is the second incident they have responded to in a few days after someone else fell through the ice on Friday. Thankfully, that person was able to make it out on their own. 

“We’ve really been utilizing a lot of resources of what we have by sending people to a location to tell people to get off the ice,” said Sgt. Richard Arsenault from the Toronto Police Marine Unit. “Don’t put yourself into a situation that you don’t need to be in.”

Police tell CityNews about 200 people were on the frozen Harbourfront waters on Saturday, causally walking in areas where the fire boat breaks the ice.

Even on Monday while CityNews was speaking to police, people slowly started making their way onto the Harbourfront ice. 

“It’s dynamically very different all over the place, depending on current, depending on sunlight, whatever takes place you can see the boat goes by a number of times throughout the day breaking the ice for the ferry,” said Sgt. Arsenault.

The temperatures will rise in a few days and that will make the ice even more unpredictable. If someone falls through the cracks, police say the difference between life and death is mere minutes.

Wet clothes will immediately start to weigh a person down, before they lose their breath and hypothermia sets in. 

Police added that there’s no law stopping somebody from going out on the ice. They are working with the Toronto Port Authority to try and get some signage in place to deter people from venturing out onto the frozen body of water. Officers and citizens like Collins are hoping people will realize that no matter how stable it may seem, no ice is safe ice.

“The old saying is if you don’t know, don’t go. It’s cracked much further away from that open water that you realize, it’s just not worth the risk,” shared Collins.