Child Falls into Pool. Man Sees It From Hotel Window, Rushes Downstairs To Save Life
It is so easy to simply sail through your daily routine and not realize how someone’s very existence can hang on the outcome of a single moment. That’s a truth one High Point, North Carolina, resident recently learned.
Corey Bennett didn’t expect to save a life on June 6. In fact, he was simply doing what so many of us do when traveling.
He was sitting in his hotel room at the Days Inn in Gastonia, North Carolina, looking out the window. But what he saw must have turned his blood to ice.
A mother and her children had begun swimming in the hotel pool when the situation suddenly turned dire as Bennett watched a young boy’s splashing turned into drowning.
“It was a split second,” he told WCNC. “It happened so fast.”
Bennett rushed downstairs and out to the pool where the mother had pulled the child from the water. Someone had already called the paramedics, yet it looked as though they might not arrive in time.
“When I first saw him, his lips were purple,” Bennett said. He wasted no time.
He got down on all fours and started performing CPR on the young boy. He labored at providing respiration and pumping on the child’s chest until his own knees were rubbed raw from the friction against the rough concrete around the pool.
“I said I wasn’t going to stop until he started breathing.” And he didn’t until the boy started “gagging the water up, and you could hear him, you could hear him start crying.”
Not every child is as blessed to have someone like Bennett around when swimming goes south. In fact, drowning is the biggest cause of death for children ages one to four.
Even those who survive can’t always count on escaping unscathed. According to the CDC, “For every child who dies from drowning, another five receive emergency department care for nonfatal submersion injuries.”
For his part, Bennett is simply glad he was there to help. “I just did what I feel like any human should do,” he told WJZY.
“Like, anybody out here that’s certified, you shouldn’t freeze up under that pressure, you shouldn’t stop. If you can save someone’s life you should save it, period.”
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