By Paul Burgarino
Inside Bay Area
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All Rights Reserved
MANTECA, Calif. — Thanks to lifesaving tactics by a trio of neighbors in a close-knit neighborhood, a potential tragedy turned out to have a happy ending.
Two-year-old Hugo Rodriguez is scheduled to return home from the hospital Wednesday evening, a day after he almost drowned in his family swimming pool.
Around 5 p.m. Tuesday, Pat Tassano and Tiny Gehrke were standing in front of Gehrke’s home in the 900 block of Placer Avenue when the father of Hugo Rodriguez came sprinting out of his home clutching the boy, who had no pulse and was not breathing.
“We were standing in front of my house, when the father came out with the boy in his hand, screaming his name,” Gehrke said. “I panicked and ran to call 9-1-1, while Pat tried to get the boy out of the dad’s hands.”
Neighbor and family friend Christina Aranda said that the boy’s twin brother, Cesar, screamed to his father that Hugo was struggling in the family’s backyard pool.
The father reportedly found the toddler face down in the pool, jumped in to retrieve him and rushed with him to the front yard seeking help.
Tassano ran to the Rodriguez’s front yard on the eastern side of the street, pried the boy out of the terrified father’s hands and began to try to resuscitatehim.
“The dad was in total shock, while the boy, he was purple,” Gehrke said.
“I just kicked into gear, I mean the adrenaline was pumping, I think I finally got my color back today,” Tassano said, adding that it had been 15 to 17 years since she took a CPR class. “I remember thinking ‘Oh my God, oh my God, make it, make it.’”
Meanwhile, in all the mayhem, Gehrke tracked down neighbor Ernie Mello, who was returning home from work.
“I saw all the commotion and then Tiny asked me if I knew CPR,” he said, noting that he had annual CPR training at his job with PG&E. “I knew we had to get oxygen into the baby, so I raised his head and gave him a couple of quick breaths.”
Mello said he could hear a gurgling sound, then turned the toddler over to let the water escape his lungs. Hugo coughed up water and let out a wail -- music to the ears of his rescuers.
“It could have been so much worse,” Mello said.
Paramedics arrived as the neighbors were reviving Hugo, who was airlifted to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.
Mello said Tassano deserves the credit for saving the boy’s life by keeping the chest compressions going until paramedics arrived.
“It was a team effort, but if Pat didn’t start administering CPR when she did, he wouldn’t have had a chance,” he said.
By Tuesday night, Hugo was back to being a happy-go-lucky kid, sitting in his hospital bed watching “Dora The Explorer” on TV, Aranda said.
Hugo had to stay at the hospital overnight for precautionary reasons, including to determine if water had been in his lungs, family members said.
“When he yelled out ‘Hey Tina!’ at the hospital, that’s when it really sank in for me. Our families are really close, and that’s when it hit me, the reality of how lucky we are.” she said. “He kept saying he wanted to go home and he’s back to normal.”
The pool did not have a security fence around it, but the backyard did have a normal six-foot fence limiting public access. This satisfies the pool fencing requirements for Manteca, police spokesman Rex Osborn said.
There are organizations throughout the area that offer CPR classes for adults. Locally, Manteca District Ambulance is offering a free adult and child CPR training from 3 to 5:50 p.m. Tuesday at the ambulance station at 245 E. Center Street.
The incident has Aranda taking no chances.
“My boys know how to swim. But with the little ones running around, you can’t keep track of them, so we’re going to be putting a security fence up,” she said. “I’m pretty sure Hugo’s father will, too.”