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SPOTLIGHT: Man Jumps Fence To Save Drowning Four-Year-Old Boy


This happened last year, but I’m re-running it right now for two very important reasons.

First, we’re heading into pool season and drowning is the #1 cause of accidental death in children 4 and under.

So sad.

So preventable.

So if posting this article can save even one life, it will be immeasurably worth it.

Please share with your friends and family.

Second, whenever I can, I like to take a pause from political news to bring you something incredible…

Something uplifting…

Something that will inspire you.

I found exactly that this morning.

Check out this amazing story:

Surveillance video shows 4-year-old, non-verbal Xavier Rigney getting inside the locked gated pool at his apartment complex and into the water. Neighbor 12-year-old Maddox Westerhaus witnessed the incident and went to get his father, Tom, who jumped the fence, rescued the young boy from the water and started CPR to save his life.

Watch the short clip right here:

Heroic!

Backup on Twitter here:

More:

More details from Fox4:

A father and his 12-year-old son are being hailed as heroes after authorities said they helped rescue a drowning, 4-year-old boy with autism from a pool.

Authorities in Lawrence, Kansas said little boy, Xavier Rigney, briefly got out of his mother’s sight and somehow made his way through a locked fence before jumping into the pool.

“His head goes completely under the water. His mouth and nose never come up above the water, and that’s why we say they don’t have the ability to scream,” Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical Lt. Jeff Krall, a paramedic who lost a child of his own in 2008, explained at a press conference. “What you see with his arms, you see just a little bit of movement, we call it climbing, they’re trying to climb out of the water.

That was when 12-year-old Maddox Westerhouse saw what happened and ran to get his father, Tom, from their nearby apartment.

“My friends were yelling at me to go get help and I just went like, ‘Oh no,’ and ran,” Maddox said.

Tom jumped over the 6-foot fence, pulled Xavier from the pool and started performing CPR.

Tom sprang into action, leaping the 6-foot fence then jumping into the pool to pull Xavier out before performing CPR.

“When he started to cough up water and everything, I knew that was a good sign,” Tom later recalled. “It definitely hits home a lot harder having a son myself.”

Xavier’s mother, Alexis, reunited with Tom and Maddox for the first time on Thursday and thanked them for their heroic actions.



 

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