"Every day is different," said Pauciello, 43. "Any time I go out I can get a call. Sometimes it's call after call, and sometimes you don't get a call all day."

Pauciello has performed all kinds of police work during his years on the job, but it's not every day that a police officer gets the chance to save a girl from an oncoming train. That's exactly what happened when Pauciello found himself in the right place at the right time on Feb. 1.

Pauciello's black and white police car crosses a bridge on Kings Highway East, with railroad tracks coming into view to his right, as he shows where the incident happened. Pauciello pointed in the direction of a snow-covered embankment. "See the two rails with the wood planks in between?" he asked. "She was walking on the planks heading this way."

"She" was a 13-year-old Bridgeport girl who wore a black jacket and her hair up in a ponytail. But at the time, Pauciello could only tell she was a woman who, he guessed, was trying to find a shortcut.

"I yelled for her to get off the tracks," Pauciello recalled. "But she kept walking."

Pauciello wondered why the girl wouldn't leave the tracks and could think of only one reason as he cut his wheel and made a wide U-turn. The officer drove back over Kings Highway East, looking for an opening to the tracks that was not too steep. "I knew she was going to do it," he said. "I thought, 'Don't do it now, because I'm going to see it. Don't let it happen in front of me.'"

"I walked down to the tracks," Pauciello said. "I asked her what she was doing, and she wouldn't answer me. I asked her what her name was. And she wouldn't give me her name. She was crying the whole time."

After asking the same questions again without success, Pauciello looked back over his shoulder. "I saw a high-speed Acela train [approaching]. They're quiet. You can't hear it until it gets up on you."

Pauciello and the girl didn't have much time to react. He looked to the left and saw they'd have to cross another set of tracks to get out of the train's path ... not enough time.

Then Pauciello's eyes went to a small patch of grass between the tracks and a fence on the other side with - perhaps - just enough room to get out of harm's way.

"I grabbed her by the arms," he said. "We went toward the fence and got probably four feet from the track."

Suddenly the train whooshed by, as Pauciello leaned against the fence, holding the girl in his arms.

"I heard the horn blow," Pauciello said. "You could feel the vibration and hear how loud it was. Not being able to move as a train goes by is pretty freaky."

Pauciello learned that the girl, a student at Longfellow School in Bridgeport, had a suicide pact with her girlfriend. Both planned to kill themselves that day. The girl eventually told Pauciello that her father beats her at home. A school resource officer in Bridgeport told Pauciello that he caught the friends skipping school hours earlier and had brought the other girl to the hospital because he determined she was suicidal.

Pauciello said he can only hope that the girl he saved gets help.

"I don't know what her situation is. Maybe when she gets the help she needs, she'll call the police department and say, 'thank you,'" Pauciello said. "Who knows? She could be on 'American Idol' someday. You don't know who she is and you don't want to pry."

Pauciello, who grew up in Trumbull, also keeps most of his personal life to himself. Prior to becoming a police officer, he was a star defensive end at Utah State, where he studied psychology. Pauciello went on to play one year in the NFL on the Cleveland Browns and another NFL team, then called the St. Louis Cardinals, in 1987.

"I was cut in November and didn't try out again," Pauciello said.

He was hired by the Fairfield Police Department in 1989.

A hero once before

This month's incident wasn't the first time he's saved a life. In 1991, he stopped a man from jumping off a bridge. Pauciello, who lived in Milford at the time, was driving to work one morning when he passed the bridge by the Bridgeport ferry and Harbor Yard. "I saw a guy sitting on the top rail of the bridge," Pauciello recalled. "I drove another 50 feet and thought, 'There's no fishing there.' I swung around and saw a state trooper fly by."

The trooper told Pauciello the man was threatening to jump and Pauciello told him he was a Fairfield police officer and offered to help.

The man had moved down to a concrete portion of the bridge with his feet dangling off the side. "He yelled, 'Don't try to stop me,'" Pauciello recounted.

Pauciello made his way toward the man and when a state police car arrived with its siren blaring, the man became distracted.

"I grabbed him and held him until the other two officers helped me to pull him up," Pauciello said. "They brought him to the hospital."

Pauciello's action earned him a medal. And an application has been submitted for Pauciello to be awarded a medal for saving the girl on the railroad tracks, according to Fairfield Police Lt. Michael Walsh.

Police Capt. Gary MacNamara said all 108 of Fairfield's officers provide a police presence that has a positive affect on the overall safety of the town, but that on Feb. 1, Pauciello experienced one of the "very few" circumstances where an officer's quick decision saved someone's life.

"This is a pretty good example of how something that appears simple at first look isn't simple at all," MacNamara said.