Helicopter buzzes Rocky Point home, knocks giant clock off wall

Nick Petroccionne was in the shower Friday afternoon when he heard the roar of a helicopter — so low and so loud that it was clear it was thundering directly over his Rocky Point home.

He had a passing thought: Are they going to land in my backyard?

Then came the sound that answered his question a different way — and scared the bejesus out of him.

“I heard this huge crash,” Petroccionne said, struggling a bit to describe the impact inside the Mahogany Road house. “And I was completely startled.”

He jumped out of the shower, rushed to the second-floor landing, and looked down the stairs. There at the bottom lay the couple’s large decorative clock — a centerpiece the family keeps mounted on the wall near the staircase.

It was on the floor and no longer working. There were scratches on the wall and wooden stairs and a dent in the floor at the bottom of the staircase.

“I realized, wait a minute — the helicopter was literally just over our house, and now this thing fell,” he said. “So it can’t be a coincidence.”

Police responded to the scene, took a report, and suggested the homeowners contact the Federal Aviation Administration.

Petroccionne and his wife, Darlene, keep an immaculate home — the kind of place where a well-chosen clock on a staircase wall isn’t just décor, it’s a focal point. That made the wreckage at the bottom of the stairs hit harder.

But it isn’t just the damage. Petroccionne said the couple has grown increasingly frustrated with persistent low-altitude air traffic over their neighborhood — a pattern the couple noted has worsened over the past year or two.

“We hear planes and helicopters every day, multiple times a day, starting from the morning all the way to midnight,” he said. “Considering we don’t live near an airport, I think it’s very noticeable. It wasn’t always this way.”

Friday’s incident, he said, was different.

“They’re never that close.”

_{Top photo: Darlen and Nick Petroccionne in their Rocky Point Home (Brian Harmon photo).}