CNN story
This is certainly NOT mundane.
It sucks on toast, though.
That’s one gutsy kid.
I’m on you with this. There is a point of the story that bothered me though. Unless I read it wrong, it was only 5 feet of water. Why didn’t the adults jump in and help?
Donnie jumped in and helped save 5-year-old Karah Moran’s life before becoming stuck in five feet of blackened rain water and muck at the bottom of the deep end.
And
As somebody called 911, adults hurried to the pool area, but the water was so filthy, so filled with debris, that they couldn’t see Donnie. Another maintenance man, Andre Mitchell, said he poked the water with a long aluminum pole used to clean pools but turned up nothing.
I mean, 5 freaking feet!! I would’ve been diving left and right for a lost child!
-K
It would’ve only taken a few people to hop in and start feeling around.
Yep, that’s my point. I can’t imagine any situation where my daughter were under water and I didn’t jump in. Filthy, debris filled…5 foot water!? Jesus, I’d be renovating that pool with my teeth.
-K
How horrible. 
Have to agree on the kid, that took a huge amount of guts.
Now, as to the adults, WTF? Were there piranhas? Was there lava? Sharks with broken glass and nails glued to their skin?
Poking with the aluminium pole has to be the worst part. It’s not like he disappeared people. :rolleyes:
This little guy has been in the news here. Gutsy kids.
To give the adults a little bit of a break, let me throw out a couple of thoughts:
1, Maybe they didn;t know how deep the water was.
2. As far as most (maybe all) of them knew, it was more or less a rumor that a kid was under the water. They couldn’t see him. Probably all they knew for certain was that one kid was screaming and pointing at the pool.
And I wonder what kind of “maintenance” the guy was going to do on a pool that clearly wan’t maintained?
I have to believe that if I have any reason whatsoever to think a kid is drowning in a pool, I’m jumping in after him. No questions, no waiting for verification, no checking to see if it’s safe. There’s no way I could live with myself if my hesitation cost the life or well-being of a child.
Sigh. What a brave kid. I am guessing and hoping that the adults didn’t realize he was in the pool. If there was any doubt in their minds… GRR. What Crazy said.
As to the Aussie lad, that boy has some serious gumption, but why the f*** wasn’t he and his dad wearing their safety equipment? If you don’t want to wear it yourself, that’s one thing, not protecting your seven year old child is another.
IDIOT.
Well, I wouldn’t. If I couldn’t swim, I certainly wouldn’t jump into water of unknown depth. And even emergency response people are trained NOT to jump blindly into situations, as more casualties will simply make the situation worse.
There are maybe a handful of people that I would literally risk everything to save, and a stranger’s child isn’t on my list. Maybe that makes me a coward. You tell me. That’s not to say I wouldn’t try something. If I pobed with a pole and determined that the water wasn’t very deep, I would certainly jump in. But oerhaps people in their excitement just didn’t think of that.
And I don’t dispute that the biy had a great deal of courage, but there might have been better choices than to jump in after her. Life saver ring, rope? Who knows?
But really, I’m just speculating, not being able to see the actual situation and figure out why things were done or not done.
I think it’s been known for a while now that people are pretty god damn stupid when out in the public. You’ve seen the videos in psych 101, people won’t do anything until at least 1 person does something. You all talk a big game, but would you have really been the one to initiate the rescue? Most opinions here are based on a eScenerio.
…eScenario
Yeah. There’s alot of room for adult casualties in a partially drained swimming pool. You grab any 100 adults off the street and 95-99 of them will know how to swim well enough to jump into a swimming pool to see if a kid was dieing. :rolleyes:
Yeah. It does. But oh well, it’s not YOUR kid right?
Wow. How heroic. :rolleyes:
Yeah. He could have gotten the poker and poked around a little bit. He is 6.
Glad this isn’t the pit.
Hmm, really? 95-99% of any of the adults in that area could swim well enough in 5’+ of brackish, leaf-and-twig-filled water to see if there’s a little boy somewhere in the bottom of it? I grew up in a school in a smallish city where the high schools had swimming pools and required PE classes in swimming to graduate, but I guarantee you that’s not the case for all schools, and certainly not necessarily in this (Chicagoland) area.
Mind you, I’m surprised that one adult couldn’t have jumped in and tried to feel around. Or at least climbed down the ladder and tried to hang onto it while feeling around with an arm or leg. I would like to think that I would have, but I will also freely admit that I hate being in water that I can’t see the bottom of, and due to a falling-through-the-ice event when I was a little kid, I probably would have become very afraid while poking around in there. I’m not sure I could have managed diving underwater in that situation.
But like ParentalAdvisory said, people in groups tend to freeze up and not do anything until one person starts first - if one person had begun to climb down the ladder or gotten in the shallow (empty) end and started walking towards the water, others might have joined in too. All you’d have needed in that situation would be someone who couldn’t swim, someone who couldn’t swim well or was afraid of going into that water, and you’ve got a good basis for a group of bystanders who aren’t going to be much help. (Moral of the story: If you’re in trouble, hope that a single competent person happens upon you, rather than a group…)
I can’t find the story, but here in the UK another child did almost exactly this and died.
Am I the only one who wouldn’t dream of letting kids that young “explore” an apartment complex by themselves, even if they did live there?
It’s a pool. Seriously. Like I don’t want to be mean or anything, but really.
I get where you’re coming from PA. If it were a burning building, or an ocean undertow or something, sure. But it’s a pool. For an adult, there’s precious little risk involved here.
Maybe I’m being obtuse or something, and if so, I apologize, but I’ve jumped in after dogs in worse places than that. It’s not like it puts a person into the “Die Hard” or “Rambo” category.
If it’s a pool with a diving board, the water could easily be deep enough to drown a non-swimming adult even if the shallow end is dry.
I was just trying to provide some ideas as to why some reasonable people would not just jump in.
True enough. I’ve been swimming since I was a tadpole, so it’s hard to envision. Although I have an adult friend who recently learned how to swim and he’s still very wary of swimming away from the edges.