6-Year-Old Is Revived After Pool Accident : Arleta: The boy’s brother and a man receive instructions from a 911 dispatcher. The child was underwater two to three minutes.

A 6-year-old boy who nearly drowned in an Arleta pool was revived by his 15-year-old brother and a man who received over-the-telephone instruction from a 911 dispatcher, family members and authorities said Wednesday.

Thuyen Dao was underwater for about two to three minutes before he was pulled out, not breathing, from the pool on Tuesday.

The child’s brother, Thang Dao, told reporters he performed impromptu cardiopulmonary resuscitation on him, assisted by an unidentified man.

Thang Dao of Boyle Heights said he tried to beat the heat on Tuesday by taking his little brother and a group of friends and relatives to a pool near a friend’s Arleta home.

“Yesterday, I didn’t want him to go really,” said the boys’ mother, Ba Nguyen, who did not accompany her boys on their excursion. “But he cried so I said ‘OK, take care of him, be careful.’ ”

Thang said he set his brother on the side of the pool, his legs dangling in the water, in an inflatable doughnut-shaped life preserver that fit around the little boy’s waist. When Thang headed to rest on a nearby bench, he said, he was certain that a friend at the crowded pool was watching the younger boy.

After Thuyen entered the pool, a friend noticed a small hand reaching up from under the water, jumped into the pool and pulled Thuyen out. By the time Thang saw the commotion, his brother was stretched out on the pavement, not breathing.

“I started pounding on his stomach and opened his mouth so he could breathe,” Thang said at a news conference outside Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. “I saw people doing it on TV and I read instructions.”

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While an unidentified man got over-the-phone life-saving instructions from Patrick Perry, a Los Angeles 911 emergency dispatcher, Thang continued to breathe into his brother’s mouth. Using Perry’s instructions, the man helped Thang tilt the boy’s head back and clear his mouth.

Finally, the little boy began to cry.

Dr. Nancy Schonfeld, the hospital’s head of emergency and transport medicine, said the boy arrived at Childrens barely conscious, meaning he likely was underwater for two to three minutes.

“Another couple of minutes and he could have been in full arrest, he could have died,” Schonfeld said. “There were 27 other people in the pool, but someone needs to be watching the child and that person needs to be a responsible adult.”

Schonfeld said Thuyen’s story should alert parents to the importance of pool safety. She urged that pools be equipped with fences, a motion sensor to detect if someone falls in and a self-locking gate.

For his part, Thuyen told his mother that he fell in the water and somehow lost his flotation device. He also said he does not want to try swimming again.

“When I see he got life, I’m so happy we got him back,” Nguyen said, just before taking her son home on Wednesday. “Almost I lost him.”

Hospital officials, noting that more children die each year as a result of accidents than from all childhood diseases combined, offered more sobering remarks.

In 1993, the hospital treated 22 drownings and serious near-drownings. So far this year, doctors at Childrens have handled 16 such cases.

“This had a really happy outcome, but many drownings around the holidays don’t have such happy endings,” Schonfeld said. “He’s a lucky boy.”