A 12-year-old boy and his father rescued a 4-year-old autistic boy from drowning in a Kansas pool.
Surveillance footage showed 4-year-old, Xavier Rigney, who is non-verbal and autistic, jumping into a pool on May 18 after managing to get through a locked fence. When Maddox Westerhouse, saw that Xavier was drowning, he knew he needed to act fast.
“Xavier was under the water for 3 minutes and 22 seconds,” Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical Battalion Chief Rob Fleeup said in a statement.
Westerhouse ran to his apartment to get his father, Tom Westerhouse. The elder Westerhouse jumped the fence and pulled Xavier from the water. Westerhouse performed CRP for nearly three minutes before Xavier finally began coughing up water and breathing.
“When he started to cough up water and everything, I knew that was a good sign,” Tom said in the statement. The Fire Department said that had he not acted, it might have been too late for the toddler.
Xavier’s mother was caring for her 4-month-old when she realized that Xavier was missing. “He’s my best friend, so I don’t know what I would do without him,” she said. She noticed emergency responders at the apartment complex and followed them to Xavier.
Children with autism are 160 times more likely to die from drowning than the general pediatric population, according to WebMD.
