Lifeguard's quick actions save drowning 14-year-old

Tracy Bryant pulls him from a St. Petersburg city pool and starts resuscitation, ignoring calls to wait.

[Times photo: Fred Victorin] Tracy Bryant, 34, left, and Amy Williams, 19, lifeguards at St. Petersburg's North Shore Pool, watch as medics care for a teen after he was pulled from the pool. The lifeguards revived the boy before medical personnel arrived.

By CRAIG PITTMAN and LEANORA MINAI
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 30, 2002

ST. PETERSBURG -- It was a busy Friday at North Shore Pool, with plenty of kids out of school for spring break. Some people were doing laps. Some were jumping from the diving board. About 1 p.m. a 14-year-old boy dived into the deep end.

He didn't come back up.

Lifeguard Tracy Bryant, 34, plunged in and pulled the teenager out. He clearly needed resuscitation.

Bystanders yelled for Bryant to wait for someone to bring her a mask used to protect rescue workers from infection.

She ignored them. Instead she and another lifeguard, 19-year-old Amy Williams, immediately set to work reviving the teenager, Emanuel Settles. His eyes were rolled back in his head. He threw up. But by the time a rescue crew arrived, Settles was conscious and able to talk.

By refusing to wait, Bryant "bought the kid 45 seconds to a minute," said Casey Zeh, 33, who was at the pool with her husband and children. "She did it without any thought of herself."

Afterward Bryant, who has worked as a lifeguard for the city's recreation department since October, declined to talk to a reporter.

Settles' mother, Geneva, said her son was being kept overnight at Bayfront Medical Center for observation but appears to be all right. The first thing he told her when she reached the hospital, she said, was, "Mom, don't go to crying."

Settles is her oldest son. She has two others, 12 and 10, and two cousins, age 12, were visiting. The day was so hot she decided to take them to the pool to cool off, but her car is not big enough to carry more than three boys at a time.

So she took the three older ones to the pool and left them there while she made the 10-minute drive home to pick up the two younger ones.

Her oldest son is no novice swimmer, she said, but he has never tried diving before. While she was gone, the other two boys were content to dangle their feet in the water. But, she said, "I guess (Emanuel) wanted to show off."

The diving board perches above the deepest part of the pool, with 11 feet 4 inches of water between the surface and the bottom. But Settles later told lifeguard Robert Langston, 25, that he thought it was just 4 or 5 feet deep -- until he went under.

Once Settles realized how deep the water was, "he started panicking," said St. Petersburg police Officer John Douglas, who witnessed the near-drowning and summoned rescue crews. "He started sucking in water."

That's when Bryant dived in and rescued him. Other lifeguards ordered everyone else out of the pool.

After Bryant and Williams revived the teenager, the third lifeguard, Langston, rode in the ambulance with him to Bayfront.

"He didn't want to let my hand go," Langston said. "He was asking what happened to him."

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

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