Movie-inspired CPR saves girl

Jade (left) and Brooke Gude gave mother Natasha the fright of her life. Picture / Hawke's Bay Today

Two men copied a life-saving method they had seen in the movies to save a little girl they had pulled unconscious from a swimming spot.

Four-year-old Brooke Gude and her twin sister Jade had been paddling in a lagoon near Ocean Beach, Havelock North, on Sunday afternoon when the drama took place.

Hastings mother Natasha Gude is praising the two Spanish-speaking men who copied CPR they had seen in the movies to save Brooke's life.

Mrs Gude had taken her two "water babies" to what she thought was a safe swimming spot.

They were playing in the water about 10m from where she was sitting.

The water was only up to their waists and the twins were not the youngest children in the lagoon, said Mrs Gude.

Her son, Chavez, aged 7, went with an adult up to the nearby beach to swim between the flags.

While sitting with her cousin, Mrs Gude looked up the beach and thought, "'Where is that boy?"

"I turned back and said, 'Where are Jade and Brooke?'

"I jumped up, threw my glasses and hat off and went running towards the water."

Mrs Gude said that when she was in the lagoon, a little girl said something like, "There's a dead baby in the water".

"I just started screaming at people to help me.

"I picked up Jade and went running back to the sand with her, and at the same time I was screaming, 'Where is my other baby?' "

She began CPR on Jade, who was unconscious and purple.

Other adults looked for Brooke. One of the rescuers tripped on the girl as she lay at the bottom of the lagoon, Mrs Gude said.

The two men dragged Brooke out, but did not know how to do CPR.

"They had just seen it on the movies," she said.

"One was pushing on her chest and the other one just blows. "They were swearing and yelling at each other in Spanish."

The girls began breathing on their own after three or four minutes.

Lifeguard Jess Berridge-Hart, of the Westshore Surf Lifesaving Club, said she was alerted to the drama when a man came to the beach tower about 4.30pm and said there was a possible drowning of two children in the lagoon about 500m behind the tower.

She alerted other guards and ran to the lagoon, where the children, one unconscious and one drifting in and out of consciousness, were on the sand.

Adults who had dragged the children from the water were administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

The lifeguards gave oxygen to the children before the Lowe Corporation rescue helicopter arrived.

Ms Gude said she found out who the novice rescuers were only yesterday through a local newspaper.

She met one of them - a Hawkes Bay man, originally from Argentina, who wanted to remain anonymous.

Mrs Gude said the girls, who were discharged from hospital yesterday morning, did not seem traumatised by the ordeal and were asking when they could go back to the beach. But the incident had made her much more wary about the water.

One of the girls had told her that one had tried to sit on the other's knee. Mrs Gude said she assumed they had tripped while trying to do that and had swallowed water.

"I can't believe they were basically gone and that they are okay," she said. "CPR saved them."

additional reporting: Hawke's Bay Today