1 Drowning, Then a 1-Man Crusade

Chet Ossowski keeps his motivation tucked inside his wallet, two photos laminated back to back. On one side is Emiline, who turns 10 this year. Flip it over and there is Brianna, who would have turned 12.

Come Feb. 20, Ossowski will visit her grave as he does twice a year. Once on Brianna’s birthday, and once on June 22, the day Ossowski watched as the 6-year-old stranger was pulled from Irvine Lake, where she had gone swimming during a birthday party.

“There were 200 people there that day; four lifeguards,” said Ossowski, 55, who wants to keep the girls’ last names private. “And somehow she managed to die.”

Brianna’s 1996 death shook the former Marine fighter pilot who works as family program director for the Central Orange Coast YMCA. He sought out Brianna’s parents and made them a promise.

“I promised them that somehow this would be turned into a positive,” Ossowski said. He was inspired to become an instructor in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and has trained thousands of Irvine high school students. “I told them that I would make this commitment: That I would work to make this planet a safer place for children--especially around water.”

One year later, Ossowski was at the same lake, which is in his neighborhood, when a 5-year-old girl found herself in over her head. She was rescued from the water, but she wasn’t breathing. She had no pulse. Ossowski stepped between the teenage lifeguards and performed CPR.

As paramedics arrived, Emiline began breathing again.

Nationwide, drowning is among the leading causes of death for children age 5 and under. In Southern California, where swimming is a rite of passage, where the ocean beckons and backyard pools are commonplace, drowning is a constant threat.

Last year, nine children age 5 and under drowned in Orange County, the most since 1996. In addition, 30 “near drownings” were reported, the first year such incidents were tracked.

On Saturday, the YMCA, along with the American Heart Assn., Children’s Hospital of Orange County and the Orange County Drowning Prevention Network will kick off an awareness campaign by teaching CPR to several hundred parents.

“If you look at how many pools there are in Orange County, it’s lucky that we don’t have many more,” said Dr. Gary Goodman, director of the pediatric intensive care unit at CHOC’s Mission Viejo branch.

In 20 years of practicing medicine, Goodman has seen so many children who have died or been left brain-damaged in the water that he has lost count. “Let’s just say it’s a lot.”

Through them, he has learned not only about the physiology of drowning, but the ecology of what allows it to occur and the emotional scars it causes.

He has seen children who have drowned in hot tubs, bathtubs, toilets and buckets containing just a few inches of water. He knows it takes only five minutes of oxygen deprivation to wipe clean the part of the brain responsible for thinking and personality.

He knows how quiet a drowning can be, how a toddler who steps innocently into a pool will not struggle, just sink to the bottom.

“They’ll just sit there at the bottom of the pool and watch the world go by,” Goodman said.

Preventable, and Thus Agonizing

He has talked to parents who plucked their living child from a pool only to hand him over dead to paramedics because they didn’t know--or didn’t try--CPR. And he has seen how, unlike parents of children who die from disease, the parents of children who drown never get over it.

“Drowning is preventable,” Goodman said. “Having to live with that--the knowledge that if only I had not answered the doorbell, or the phone, if I hadn’t turned my attention away for just a minute, that this wouldn’t have happened.

“The guilt just eats them up. The pain doesn’t go away. These people are never the same again. They’re like hollow people, like shadows.”

Marcia Kerr knows the emptiness and regret. In 1988, her 2-year-old son Cody was in the care of a nanny, asleep on the couch. Suddenly, he wasn’t asleep. He walked out an unlocked back door and into the family’s pool, which had been cleaned that day.

Because of the cleaning, the pool’s cover had been left off to allow the chemicals to air out.

“We found out about all the false truths about children and drowning,” said Kerr, now 54. “We always thought that because we were good parents, something like this wouldn’t happen to us. We learned that you have to have safety equipment in place every moment because you can’t watch your kids every moment.”

Because of what he has seen, Goodman, the father of two, won’t own a home with a pool.

Kerr and her husband, Bill, on the other hand, decided after Cody’s death that they and their two daughters--too young at the time to know how their brother died--would head back in the water.

“We forced ourselves to ... sit in that pool,” Kerr said. “We needed to get our life back to normal. We didn’t blame the water. We blamed ourselves.”

The Kerrs dealt with grief by attacking it, and the issue of drowning, head on. Marcia shares her story with parents in support groups. Bill started a pool safety products company and helped produce an informational video when California law changed, requiring fences or barriers around new pools.

The couple’s motivation sits on a shelf in their Lake Forest home: an urn of Cody’s ashes surrounded by toy cars and a Superman doll.

“It’s something you never get over,” Marcia Kerr said. “There’s a hole in my family. I will never have another son again.

“He’d be almost 16 now. After it happened, I’d see 2-year-olds and think of him. Now, when I see 16-year-old boys, I always wonder what he’d be like, what he’d be doing, what he’d be interested in. I think of him every single day.”