This is a friend of AC and myself. The story was a little unclear, the families didn't know each other, they just happened to be in the same place at the right time.





Boy revived after nearly drowning
By Mary Garrigan, Journal staff
RAPID CITY — Brady Riker’s best birthday gift was having the good luck to share a birth date with Perry Huffman’s daughter.

 
Brady Riker, 5, shows off two of the Matchbox cars he got from Perry Huffman, an emergency medical technician and a firefighter with the Fort Meade Fire Department, who saved Brady from drowning Saturday at a Rapid City hotel. (Seth A. McConnell/Journal staff)

Brady was celebrating his fifth birthday Saturday afternoon at the Ramkota Water Park when the festivities nearly turned fatal. His mother, Donna, found Brady floating face down near a waterslide just minutes after losing track of him amid the eight children at his party and numerous others, including the guests at Kenedi Huffman’s eighth birthday party.

“I saw him floating face down underneath one of the slides,” Donna Riker said. By the time she pulled him from the shallow pool, “he was blue. He wasn’t moving, and his eyes had rolled back,” Riker said. “I pushed on his stomach to get the water out, but I don’t know how to do CPR. I just started yelling.”

Meanwhile, Perry Huffman was across the pool playing with his 11-month-old baby when he noticed a panicked look on his father-in-law’s face that he will never forget.

Huffman, an emergency medical technician and a firefighter with the Fort Meade Fire Department, rushed over to find the child as white as a sheet, not breathing and without a pulse.

“I gave him two quick breaths, and they didn’t go in, so I knew he still had water in him,” he said.

Huffman performed CPR and, within maybe 30 seconds, Brady began to respond and move, he said.

“They tell me it was maybe three minutes from the time we pulled him from the pool and he started breathing again, but it seemed like an hour,” Riker said. By the time paramedics arrived, Brady was being warmed up in a motel room and was yelling and screaming, much to his mother’s delight.

After spending the night in the hospital for observation, Brady is home and feeling fine today. “The doctors say he is absolutely fine,” Donna said.

It may take Huffman a little longer to recover.

“I’ve done CPR on older people, but this was my first time rescuing a child. Afterwards, it hit me like a ton of bricks,” Huffman said. “The look on my father-in-law’s face, and that look on Brady is going to haunt me forever.”

Huffman checked on Brady at the hospital late Saturday, bringing along some Matchbox fire trucks and an offer of a ride on a real fire truck someday. He got a big hug from Brady in return.

“It’s kind of weird how it all happened,” Huffman said. Both Brady and Kenedi have a Feb. 3 birthday, but both waited to celebrate until Feb. 10.

Donna and Bobby Riker, who say Huffman saved their son’s life, are thrilled with that coincidence. They say there’s nothing they could give Huffman to repay his gift. “I’m so indebted to him,” Donna said, choked with emotion. “I gave him a big hug, but there’s nothing I can ever do to repay him.”