‘You turn your back for one second ...’
3-year-old survives near-drowning thanks to her 6-year-old sister and their mother
July 1 started out as a day of summer fun Ann Benedetto and her family.
Benedetto, her husband, Vernon, and their three children, Emma, 6, and twins Andrew and Abigail, 3, were at her brother’s home for a day of swimming and family fun.
“I have a large family,” Benedetto said. “I’m one of seven, so anytime we get together it becomes like a party atmosphere just because of the sheer number of us.”
But by the end of the afternoon, the fun turned to terror when Benedetto, who was with Andrew at one end of the pool, heard her eldest daughter screaming for help only feet away.
“All the sudden, I heard Emma screaming, ‘Mommy help! Mommy help!’” she said. “I saw she was holding Abigail by her feet, and there was a look of complete panic on Emma’s face.”
Abigail had fallen into the pool only feet from where Benedetto had been standing on a ladder helping
her son. Emma spotted her sister and dove into the water to save her.
With the help of one of her nephews, Benedetto was able to get Abigail out of the pool and onto the patio. But the child wasn’t breathing. She was purple, Benedetto said, and foam was coming from her tiny mouth.
“I looked at my little 3-year-old baby, and thought, ‘Oh, my God, there’s nothing
I can do for her,’” she said.
Then her training as a registered nurse kicked in, and Benedetto sprang to action.
“I knew that she needed help and it was going to be me to do it,” said Benedetto, a nurse at Vassar Brother’s Medical Center who, as fate would have it, had just completed her basic life support refresher course.
While Benedetto began chest compressions on her daughter, other family members called 911 and another sister, a paramedic who was at home getting ready for work with the New Paltz
Rescue Squad.
After what seemed like an eternity of doing compressions on Abigail, the child began to cough and breathe, Benedetto said.
She was taken by ambulance to Vassar Brothers Medical Center, then transported to Maria Ferrari Children’s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center.
Abigail has made a full recovery and suffered no lasting effects from the time her brain was without oxygen, her mother sad. And now everyone in the 34-member family plans to make sure
that, if tragedy should ever strike again, they will all be prepared to respond.
This weekend, the New Paltz Rescue Squad will be back at Bill Dietz’s home on Springtown Road, where it will offer a community cardiopulmonary resuscitation course to the family members and their friends.
Lifeguards will be on hand, as well, to offer drowning-prevention tips.
“It’s such an important thing to learn,” Benedetto said.
Benedetto said what happened to her family shows how dangerous pools can be and how quickly things can go wrong.
Abigail, she said, is a selfproclaimed “fraidy cat” who, only a short time before the incident, declared she was “too afraid” to go into the deep end.
“There were plenty of adults, and in a split second she was just in the pool,” Benedetto said. “You turn your back for one second, and anything can happen.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children between 1 and 4 years old have the highest drowning rates among all drowning victims, and of those drownings, most occur in home swimming pools.
Abigail has no recollection of the tragedy that could have been, her mother said, but Emma is beginning to embrace the fact that she helped to save her sister’s life.
Shortly after the incident, Benedetto said she bought the older girl a Wonder Woman journal.
The 6-year-old’s first entry: “I saved my sister’s life in the pool.”