911 Dispatcher Helps Man Save Drowning Daughter

Bruce and Grace Iacovino’s toddlers wear inflated sleeves on their arms to keep them afloat when they go near the backyard swimming pool--at least they’re supposed to.

The youngest of the Iacovinos’ seven children, 2-year-old Regina, slipped hers off when no one was looking during a family barbecue Sunday. She fell into the pool unnoticed. When Gregory Carroll, a neighbor who was in the pool at the time, spotted her and fished her out, her eyes rolled back and she stopped breathing.

“She looked dead in the pool,” said Bruce Iacovino, 44, who was sitting just a few yards away playing cards when he heard the screams. His son-in-law, Jim Clayton, tried to revive her. Iacovino said that both he and his wife became nearly hysterical.

A Santa Ana police dispatcher’s presence of mind calmed Iacovino and may have saved Regina’s life.

As Iacovino tried to pump water out of Regina and life back into her, Clairann Clayton, 24, their oldest daughter, ran to the phone and dialed 911. She screamed at Santa Ana police dispatcher Beth Frank: “Hurry! Hurry! My baby sister drowned, and she stopped breathing!”

Frank, 26, a former police officer in Orange and a dispatcher for Santa Ana since 1984, got the address of the house--in the 2700 block of South Center Street. Then, as a frantic Bruce Iacovino ripped the phone away from his daughter and implored the police to hurry, Frank calmly but firmly talked Iacovino through an emergency procedure that got Regina breathing again.

Iacovino relayed the instructions he received from Frank to his son-in-law, who was trying to revive the little girl.

Within minutes, she was breathing--and crying--again.

She spent the night at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital, but she was fine the next day, her mother said.

“I feel like she was snatched from me and given back,” Grace Iacovino, 42, said at her Santa Ana home Tuesday. She was standing by the pool, clutching Regina in her arms. “With them helping on the phone, and (the paramedics) getting here as fast as they did, they gave my baby back to me.”

She said Regina would swim again soon.

“I want her to respect water but not fear it,” she said, adding that she was going to buy life preservers that children cannot remove by themselves.

Said Frank, who had never handled a call involving a drowning child before: “It was quite a frightening experience. I have a 3-year-old daughter, and I sure thought about that while I was on the phone with the man.”

Frank said she was “forceful” with Iacovino on the phone because she wanted to make sure he was relaying her instructions accurately. And while her voice may have sounded calm, she was as scared as they were, she said. But she didn’t let it show.

“If you get hysterical, and you’re talking to a hysterical person, you’re going to lose them,” she said.