5-year-old rescued after falling into water
Published: January 1, 2005
A 5-year-old boy and two young girls were playing unsupervised at a Westminster park Friday when the boy fell through ice on a retention pond and nearly drowned, police said.
Authorities didn’t know how long the child was underwater before his mother arrived and ultimately a man police later identified as Dermet Carroll, who is in his 30s, pulled the blue and unconscious boy from the water.
“A guy was doing CPR, and a whole bunch of water was coming out of the boy’s mouth,” said Monica Chavez, 13, who was walking through Cobblestone Park with her mother and friend as the events unfolded.
The boy’s mother, who lives nearby, arrived “long after” the boy fell in and was trying to get the child out of the water, said Stephanie Topkoff, Westminster police spokeswoman.
Chavez said the mother couldn’t navigate around large chunks of ice. As she tried, the two young girls screamed and cried at the edge of the pond. Witnesses said the girls appeared to be about the same age or younger than the boy.
A man sprinted from a nearby apartment complex, took off his shoes and got onto the ice, which immediately broke and dumped him chest-deep into near-freezing water, said Laurie Chavez, who was walking in the park with her daughter.
“The guy who jumped in moved the chunks of ice and got the baby out,” said Laurie Chavez, who called authorities on a cellphone. “He wasn’t breathing when they took him out of the water. He was already blue.”
The incident happened just several hundred yards from St. Anthony North Hospital, where rescue workers took the boy. Emergency-room staff worked on him for an hour before he was stable enough to be airlifted to Children’s Hospital in Denver, said Tim Read, a Westminster police spokesman.
Authorities declined Friday to release his name and had no additional information on his condition.
Carroll, the rescuer who gave the boy CPR, appeared not to have been injured but was taken to a hospital to be examined, Topkoff said.
“He’s very upset and just frozen,” Read said. “He didn’t want to go to the hospital.”
Authorities said there was a half-hour window of time from when the boy was last seen at his home near the park and the near-drowning, which was called in at 2:08 p.m.
“If this is the result of a neglect situation, of course our Police Department would be looking into that,” Topkoff said.
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