"One of the boys came running over to me. He was crying."
61-year-old Paul Urban had just gotten home from work and was cutting his grass about a quarter to seven. Suddenly a teenage boy visiting his neighbors at 24 Sherwood Lane in Mansfield came running up to him.
Urban tells Action News, "I think he said his brother or his friend, but he said, 'he's drowning. We need help.'"
Urban turns off his riding lawn mower, throws his cigar away and makes a bee line for his neighbor's backyard where another teen was attempting to pull the 15-year-old's body out of the swimming pool.
"Once I got him out he didn't have a heartbeat, so I applied CPR. And as I was applying CPR, the other boy was giving him mouth to mouth," says Urban.
Minutes seemed like hours as Urban and the young man worked to revive the teenager before paramedics could arrive on the scene. And then, "his pulse came back and then he started getting stronger and stronger and stronger."
Moments later, paramedics arrived and rushed the teenager to the hospital where he was expected to make a full recovery. For Urban, a sales rep. for Exact Solutions Copier Company out of Colts Neck, NJ, it was a good thing that he still remembered CPR from his days with the Navy in Vietnam.
"Instinct. I've been out of the Navy for forty years. And it just came back to me. 40 years ago I had to do CPR and all that so I just did it."
It was also fortunate that Urban waited until later to get nervous about what had just happened and went back to cutting his grass to calm down. He's just glad the teenager tonight is going to be alright.
