Emergency Response : Boy Next Door Saves Daughter of Disabled Mom From Back-Yard Drowning

For several seconds, Lorena Chocotec lived a mother’s worst nightmare: Her 2-year-old daughter, Erica, was floating face down in a swimming pool, and Chocotec, polio stricken and unable to swim, could do nothing but scream.

Moments later, her neighbor, 16-year-old Steven Perez, leaped over the fence and into the pool and pulled the little girl out. Although he did not know cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Steven frantically pumped her chest and stomach.

His quick thinking, authorities said, saved Erica’s life. She regained consciousness, and a checkup at Humana Hospital-West Anaheim revealed that she only suffered from water in her lungs.

“The doctor told me she’ll be all right and that she will not suffer anything permanent,” a teary but happy Chocotec said Friday. “She won’t remember what happened. I will never forget.”

Chocotec, who contracted polio as a child in Mexico, leaned against her crutch to comfortably watch her daughter play with Steven in the back yard and recounted what happened Thursday. About 11:45 a.m. she noticed that Erica, whom she had seen minutes before, was gone. At the same time, a visiting friend told Chocotec she heard a splash in the back yard.

Chocotec said that Erica had apparently removed the piece of wood that holds the sliding glass door closed.

While the friend ran to get help, Chocotec struggled on her crutch to the back yard, where she saw her daughter floating in the middle of the pool. Feeling helpless, Chocotec lay down by the pool and desperately extended her crutch toward the toddler.

“I couldn’t jump in because I can’t swim,” Chocotec recalled in Spanish, tears streaming down her face. “All I could do was wave my pole (crutch) and scream to her: ‘Erica, please, please reach for the pole!’ ”

Meanwhile, her friend ran next door and told Steven what had happened. The teen-ager hopped the fence and jumped into the pool.

“She was still, her lips were blue and I was so scared that I wouldn’t be able to do anything,” he recalled. “I grabbed her in a bear-hug position and began squeezing her stomach.”

He remembered from football training at school that he had to get the water out of Erica’s system, he said.

“When she threw up, I was happy because I knew I did the right thing and that she was going to live,” he said.

It could have been tragically different. All summer, Steven has been going to the beach every day, all day. Thursday, for a reason no one seems to remember, his mother made him stay home.

“I don’t want to think of what could have happened if he wasn’t around,” Chocotec said. “I thank God for him because he saved my daughter.”