JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – James Sizemore and his wife walk their dogs most evenings after work in their Southside neighborhood.
On April 17, as they turned to walk home, they ran into some friends and stopped to talk. If they hadn’t, the rest of the night might have gone very differently.
A few minutes later, a woman rushed up to Sizemore, asking if he had seen her little girl and if he could help find her. (NOTE: News4JAX is not identifying the mother or her child at the mother’s request.)
“I was a lifeguard in Fernandina Beach for years. My instinct was to guard the water,” said Sizemore, who ran straight to the pond behind the mother’s home and just started scanning the water, knowing children are attracted to water. “I’m a merchant mariner and lifelong surfer, so I’m on the water a lot, used to seeing things in the water.”
That day, he saw something.
“She was floating about 6 inches under the water, and a little bit of her shirt was floating on the top of the water,” he said. “Her mother saw that I saw something and ran straight into the water.”
Sizemore said the woman grabbed her 2-year-old daughter and was rushing back toward the bank, but then started to sink because retention ponds drop off quickly and have a very soft bottom.
“They both were going down,” Sizemore said, so he jumped in and got them out of the water.
Sizemore learned CPR when he was 12 years old, so he knew what to do when he saw that the little girl was not breathing. Without hesitation, he started giving breaths, and the mother started giving compressions. As they performed CPR together, Sizemore’s friend called 911.
“I just started praying to God that this was not her time,” Sizemore said, explaining that he had to clear the girl’s throat more than once because some candy was keeping his breaths from going into her lungs.
Cellphone video recorded by a neighbor who spotted what was going on from a distance shows the intense and scary moments on the bank of the pond as the pair tried to get the little girl to breathe. Sizemore, the neighbor who called 911 and the 2-year-old’s mother were doing everything they could to save the little girl.
Officer Christopher Bruns was one of the first officers to arrive, and his body-worn camera captured his rush to help the girl.
In the video, Bruns can be seen running from his car to the backyard near the retention pond where the 2-year-old’s lifeless body was being worked on by Sizemore and the child’s mother.
“I knew it was a child that was drowning, but that was all I knew -- and the location,” Bruns said. “My training just kicked in. I started doing CPR and another neighbor ran up. She was like a nurse practitioner or something.”
That neighbor is Dr. Patricia Barrozo, a nurse practitioner who happened to see Bruns as she was pulling into the gated community.
“He was having trouble getting through the gate. I let him in,” Barrozo explained.
Then she followed him.
“I just knew something was going on, and I immediately went into rescue mode,” she said.
She said she relieved the officer and took over CPR.
Video then shows Jacksonville Fire Rescue arriving. Engineer Todd Kirshbaum and Lt. Jamie Dunlap with Station 28 rushed into the backyard, picked the girl up and ran with her to their rescue unit.
Dunlap said that as luck had it, they were nearby when the call about the near drowning came in.
“She wasn’t breathing. She still had a pulse, fortunately,” Dunlap said. “So we used our machines and all the other equipment we have here. Everyone was working really hard.”
Then, the best thing happened. The little girl started to cry.
“A crying baby is a breathing baby, is a live baby, so we were happy,” Dunlap said. “Oh my gosh, we were literally clapping and praising the baby. Thank you, thank you, cheering her on.”
Within 15 minutes of arriving on the scene, they took the little girl to the hospital, and just 2½ hours after she nearly drowned, the 2-year-old was responding to questions and talking as if nothing had happened to her.
“The bystanders, JSO, everyone else involved who were able to get there played a role in saving the child’s life,” Dunlap said of those performing CPR.
Bruns said he followed the little girl’s medical condition that day, anxious to know if she would be alright.
“Once I heard that she was going to be OK, she’s going to live. It was like, ‘Right, yeah, did some good work today,’” he said. “‘Now off to the next call.’”
The work for first responders never ends, and that day, the help of bystanders saved a little girl.
Barrozo said she hopes everyone will learn CPR, since you never know when you’ll need to perform it.
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“The thing that I would say to people is don’t panic. Push hard, push fast, circulate the blood flow because if you can respond quickly, the chance of survival for bystander CPR outside of the hospital, you can increase the chance of survival two to three times,” she explained.
The little girl and her mother visited Sizemore to thank him the day after the 2-year-old nearly drowned. Sizemore said she looked like nothing happened.
The mother explained how the little girl ended up in the pond. She told Sizemore she and the girl had been outside and when they walked back in the house, which backs up to a retention pond, she closed the door, but she thinks the wind must have pushed it open. She thinks when she walked into a different room, her 2-year-old wandered out of the house.
Sizemore said being in the right place at the right time was meant to be because he shouldn’t have been there at all. Normally, he would be home by that time, but running into the friends delayed him. He doesn’t even live on the same street as the 2-year-old and her mother.
“Honestly, my theology, it wasn’t her time to go,” Sizemore said.
Barrozo also credited “divine intervention” with why she was there to help. She would typically have been at the gym that night, she said, but she decided not to go -- and arrived home just as Officer Bruns was trying to get into the gated community.
Sizemore said he now considers himself the little girl’s unofficial uncle.
“I’ll vet her future boyfriends,” he joked.
Without him -- and five other strangers -- she might not be around to have any.