The Frost family was enjoying their reunion in Newport Beach, California, when their nephew called out for help.
Stuart Frost said that he and his family were on the beach playing games when his nephew, Jesse Martin, 35 said that a woman was frantically looking for her 3-year-old son Brooks.
“I could see this lady down the beach with her hands on her head, just distraught. So I said to my family, ‘Let’s go help her.’ She was around like 50 people, and none of them got up to help her. It was really odd,” said Frost.
The entire family consisting of about 30 people rushed over to help the woman look for her son, who she said was wearing blue swim trunks. The men began searching the hills, digging deeper in them, and that is when Martin felt the boy beneath the sand and saw his blue swim trunks.
“We started digging, and Jesse found this little boy, Brooks, and pulled him out. He was ash grey, he was dead. He was dead. So we pulled him out, and the mom was just beside herself,” said Frost. The 3-foot hole the toddler was digging had collapsed on top of him. They began to give the boy CPR, and after a minute or so the boy’s lips started to quiver. After a few minutes, he started to breathe again and began screaming for his mom.
“We were cleaning out the sand out of his mouth, just making sure nothing would go down his lungs,” said Stuart Frost. “When Brooks finally said the word, ‘Mom,’ that’s when I knew we were OK. And it was pure relief,” Frost told azfamily.com
According to Newport Beach Lifeguard Battalion Chief Brent Jacobsen, the boy was rushed to the hospital, and he would up being ok. “One of the neat things about the story is that later that day, the family came over and showed us a picture of him laughing and smiling and doing okay,” Frost said. “It was truly a miracle.”
And as for Martin, being that he has two young children of his own, he does not consider himself a hero: “I’m not a hero. I have two kids of my own, it scares me. I just like to help out and help anyone we can. I knew (the mom) was frantic and scared. Kids have gotten away from me, I know the feeling. I just tried to jump in and help,” he said.
Lifeguard Battalion Chief Jacobsen says that sand entrapment is a danger many people are not aware of:
“It is very easy to become entrapped,” he said. “Sand can weigh several hundred pounds and you don’t even realize it.”
It’s recommended that holes be dug no deeper than one foot and that tunnels are not dug or climbed into. Both children and adults have been injured and killed from sand collapses at beaches.
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[Featured Image Credit: Flickr CC/Michael Coghlan via ijreview]
Sand Collapses On 3-Year-Old And Nearly Kills Him is an article from: LifeDaily