An 8 year-old boy from California is being hailed as a hero after he saved the life of his little sister, who had fallen in the family’s backyard pool and nearly drowned.
KOVR reported that thanks to the quick thinking of Tino Conboy, his younger sister Cami is alive today.
“I’m just so impressed with him,” said Tino’s mom, Diana Conboy. “He was so calm and collected.”
Tino and Cami were playing at their home in Placerville when he suddenly noticed that it had gotten way too quiet.
“I looked at the pool and then I saw Cami in there,” Tino recalled. “I said, ‘Mom!'”
Diana, who is a nurse, came running as soon as she heard her son scream. She pulled Cami out of the water and began performing CPR as she told Tino to call 911.
“[Cami] couldn’t move her muscles,” Tino remembered of the terrifying ordeal. “She couldn’t move anything, not even her eyes.”
Diana said that finally, Cami was “able to throw up and start breathing.”
“That’s when I saw signs of life,” she explained, adding that while all of this was happening, Tino calmly “called 911, gave them our address, and told them to get here immediately.”
“It’s kind of a blur to me because it seemed like the timing was forever, but I’m sure it was just minutes,” the mother recalled.
Though Tino is the hero here, he credits his sister with teaching him how to scream loud enough to alert their mother as to what was going on.
“Basically Cami gave her power to me and then that’s how I had the power to scream,” he said. “And then Mom came over and jumped in and got Cami out.”
Tino also sees his mom as a hero, saying, “I thought [mom] was brave that she just went in so that she could save her daughter.”
Since this horrifying incident, the family has put a fence up around their pool to ensure that it won’t happen again. Diana just feels lucky that things turned out as well as they did, and she hopes their story will encourage other parents to learn CPR.
“It was definitely the beginning of the worse day of my life, but ended with the best day of our lives,” Diana said.
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