Inspired by film, U.S. boy rescues little brother
10-year-old saw The Rock doing CPR
WASHINGTON • Jacob O’Connor saw his baby brother’s shoe floating in the pool first.
Then he saw his body. It had been just a week since the 10-year-old Michigan boy last watched his favourite movie, San Andreas, an action drama that stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson rescuing his family from two hours of tragedy — an earthquake, a tsunami and, most relevant to Jacob, a near-drowning.
Johnson’s character pulls his unconscious daughter from floodwaters and gives her CPR, first in a collapsing building, then in a boat. Finally, she spits up water.
So as Jacob pulled his two-year-old brother Dylan from the pool and laid him on the deck, his mind channelled The Rock.
“The movie just popped up in my head and I started thinking about that scene,” Jacob, of Roseville, Michigan, told The Washington Post. “And that’s when I started doing the compressions.”
For half a minute, Jacob said he pushed and pushed until Dylan’s “heart started pumping.” And then, just like The Rock’s daughter, Jacob’s brother “vomited a little water.”
Now, nearly a month later, Dylan has fully recovered and Jacob is being hailed a hero — by his family, local law enforcement and The Rock himself.
“You’re a real life hero,” The Rock wrote in one of four tweets about Jacob’s actions. “We’re all proud of you!”
The boys’ mother, Christa O’Connor, told The Post that she shared details of the July 25 incident with her hometown newspaper, C&G Newspapers, last week.
In the days since, Jacob’s story has been published across the country and the world.
The Rock tweeted several of them, thanking “media friends for covering such an inspiring story.”
“What a brave (and calm) 10-year-old boy in the face of that heightened distress,” The Rock wrote Thursday.
“Real life hero 10yr old Jacob O’Connor found his 2yr old brother, Dylan lying face down in their pool. Amazing story. Amazing boy,” he tweeted.
Jacob, who starts Grade 5 next month, isn’t so sure about all the fanfare. When asked if he feels like a hero, the boy responded with a “kind of.”
But Fire Chief Michael Holland is more certain.
“What an amazing thing, at 10 years old, to think in that stressful situation about what the right thing to do for your younger brother is — that’s stunning,” Holland told C&G Newspapers.
On the day of the incident, Jacob was in between episodes of Lego Ninjago with his brothers when he realized two-year-old Dylan was gone — and the door to the backyard was wide open.
Moments before, the toddler had been dancing in the kitchen, waiting for his grandmother to put him down for a nap. Jacob was keeping an eye on him. But somehow, the boy said, Dylan managed to open the sliding door and get in the pool.
After giving Dylan chest compressions, Jacob said he ran inside to retrieve his grandmother, Ellen Viau. She resumed CPR on the toddler and called 911.
Christa O’Connor was at work, cleaning a mansion 45 minutes away, when she learned what had happened. Viau, her mother, called from the ambulance as it sped toward St. John Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit. At the hospital, she found Dylan lying in bed on oxygen with two IVs hooked up to his arm.
“I lost it,” she told The Post. “I bawled my eyes out.”
That was before she learned what Jacob had done. Once Dylan was stabilized at the hospital, O’Connor went home to talk with Jacob. They sat on the front porch and O’Connor asked her eldest son where he had learned to do chest compressions.
“I saw it in a movie,” she remembers him saying. “What movie?” she asked. “San Andreas,” Jacob replied. “With The Rock.”
Dylan was discharged from the hospital the day after the incident with no apparent neurological damage, O’Connor said. “I feel blessed,” she told The Washington Post.
In the last two days, reporters from the United Kingdom and Good Morning America have reached out. Perhaps Ellen DeGeneres will be next, Jacob hopes, or maybe even The Rock.
O’Connor created a Twitter account this week for that very purpose.
“PLEASE make his dream come true,” she tweeted to The Rock. “He deserves it! Meet & greet?”
I SAW IT IN A MOVIE. SAN ANDREAS WITH THE ROCK.