One Detroit 2-year-old has a new hero, and it is not “The Rock.”
But if it wasn’t for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s lifesaving moves in disaster action movie San Andreas, then the boy’s older brother, 10-year-old Jacob O’Connor would not have known what to do.
In the movie, the San Andreas fault delivers California a magnitute-9.1 quake and Johnson stars as a rescue chopper pilot navigating the chaos to save his family.
And while movies aren’t usually the best places to learn how to be a real life hero, Jacob learned his lifesaving moves from a scene where Johnson’s character saved his daughter.
Jacob recounted the story of how he found his younger brother face down in the pool to local TV station WXYZ.
“I was turning on a show then a minute later the doors were open,” he said.
Jacob looked to see what had happened and saw that his younger brother, Dylan, had opened the screen door and fallen in the pool.
“I pulled him out and started giving him compressions,” Jacob said.
Ellen Vial, the boys’ grandmother, was getting ready to put Dylan down for a nap in another room when Jacob came in to tell her what had happened.
“He was more, ‘Nana, um Dylan opened the door and got in the back yard,” Vial recalled.
She said Jacob was calm but when she looked at the 2-year-old on the ground, she knew it was serious.
“I looked in his eyes and his eyes were up in his head and not focused and that’s what really scared me,” she said.
They rushed the toddler to the hospital, where mom, Christa, suffered a parent’s worst nightmare.
“The first few hours at the hospital were the worst because they weren’t sure if he was going to fully recover,” she said.
“They couldn’t tell me he’s going to be okay,” she said.
Fortunately, he was.
Compressions are the most critical element of cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR, which also includes mouth-to-mouth or some other form of artificial ventilation.
Compressions keep blood circulating in the body, delivering oxygen to the brain, preventing brain damage.
Dylan had been face down in the water for almost a minute.
Jacob said he learned how to do compressions from “The Rock.”
“There was an earthquake, then it caused a tsunami and then there was a daughter that was drowning and he had to get her out and he did the same thing,” said Jacob.
Jacob’s’s lifesaving moves were a big inspiration to his on-screen hero.
Johnson, who read the story from media reports, tweeted about it several times.
Real life hero 10yr old Jacob O’Connor found his 2yr old brother, Dylan lying face down in their pool. Amazing story. Amazing boy. https://t.co/0cHsuBGqwS
— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) August 24, 2017
It pays to watch @TheRock‘s movies: A 10-year-old boy in Michigan saved his brother’s life, remembering San Andreas. https://t.co/zoBMPfu3Tw
— Brad Galli (@BradGalli) August 24, 2017
Thank you media friends for covering such an inspiring story. What a brave (and calm) 10yr old boy in the face of that heightened distress https://t.co/H9zDPRwVje
— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) August 24, 2017
