‘My heart sank’: Phoenix dad recounts son’s pool drowning scare

PHOENIX – A Valley father is sharing the story of how he pulled his 10-month-old son from a backyard pool and performed CPR until the boy started breathing again.

It is a near-tragedy he hopes will remind other parents to stay vigilant around water.

Lionel Gonzalez and his wife were winding down on a Sunday afternoon in 2020 to watch a movie. They were renting a house without a pool fence, so they took extra steps to make sure then-10-month-old Silas and 4-year-old Josiah stayed safe.

“I always have a checklist to go through,” Gonzalez said. “And that’s making sure doors are locked, nothing on the kitchen counter for Silas to grab,” plus making sure toilet seats are down, stairs are blocked and the doggy door is locked.

As the movie started, Gonzalez realized his sons were no longer playing together. Silas was missing.

“As soon as that thought came to mind, my wife voiced her thought and asked, ‘Where’s the baby?’

I thought maybe he snuck over to where the staircase was and she confirmed he wasn’t over there,” Gonzalez said.

They searched the inside of the house but couldn’t find Silas.

“That’s when I looked to my right and looked at the sliding door and doggy door,” Gonzalez said. “I saw the doggy door was open. That’s when my heart sank.”

Gonzalez then approached the pool

“I saw Silas floating face down in the pool. As soon as I saw that, that’s when I just yelled, ‘call 911, call 911,'” he said. “I jumped in as fast as I could and took him out of the water.”

Gonzalez carried his son to the other side of the pool deck.

“I wanted to wake him up. I started, not shaking him, but kind of moving him around and slapping his face a little bit and telling him to wake up,” Gonzalez said. “I just couldn’t accept what was happening.”

He began chest compressions, but his wife explained he was doing it wrong.

After three sets of CPR, 30 compressions with two breaths, Gonzalez started to lose faith.

“I started seeing blue come down from the middle of his forehead, wrap around his eye and then go to his upper lip,” he said.

He panicked more. When he heard gurgling, he knew CPR was working.

“By the fifth set of CPR, I saw that same blue that came down his forehead start retracting the same way it came down,” Gonzalez said.

Firefighters took over CPR and rushed Silas to the hospital, where he remained for three days. The young boy spent 16 hours on the ventilator.

Gonzalez later learned how his son got out.

“My mom ended up letting the dog out through the doggy door,” he said. “It was an accident, a freak accident. It’s easy to get complacent in life. It’s easy to just overlook things, but you just have to slow down your routine. Don’t assume someone else is watching your kid.”

Silas will be entering kindergarten in the fall.

Learn more about how you can prevent a tragedy. Fulton Homes reminds you that 2 Seconds is Too Long.

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