Teen lifeguard saves toddler from drowning

Cara Latham Staff Writer
   WASHINGTON – Evan Moshinsky was just doing his job.
   That’s how the 16-year-old Tanager Lane resident responds when he hears people calling him a hero and commending him for saving a young girl’s life – three months into his first stint as a lifeguard.
   Even though Evan said he expected he would be helping people in distress as they swam in the pool at the Mews housing complex of the Estates at Princeton Junction in West Windsor this summer, he didn’t expect he would actually save someone’s life.
   ”This is the first actual save I had to make,” said Evan. “It was a pretty intense one.”
   On Aug. 25, as he was guarding the pool, a 23-month old girl slipped and fell into the pool. She wasn’t wearing any type of floatation device.
   ””“””She was floating at the top,” he said. “I think she might have been unconscious.”
   She also might have hit her head on the way in.
   When Evan got to the girl, her lips were purple, she wasn’t breathing, and she didn’t have a pulse. While another lifeguard called emergency services, Evan got to work. First, he gave her mouth-to-mouth, CPR, and then chest compressions.
   ”It only took about two breaths and six or seven compressions,” he said. “She woke up and starting crying.”
   According to Lt. Carl Walsh, of the West Windsor Police Department, the incident happened around 2 p.m. Lt. Walsh said the girl – whose name police would not release – was breathing when rescue workers left the pool to transport her to Capital Health System Helene Fuld Campus in Trenton.
   After the incident, Evan said the pool was closed for an hour, and people kept asking him what happened. Evan’s supervisors and the owners of the pool also responded to the incident, and most people, he said, were in a state of shock.
   Still, everyone was commending him for saving the girl’s life.
   ”’We feel more safe here because we know we have a lifeguard who knows what he’s doing,’” he recalled them saying.
   One of the rules at the pool – in place before the incident – is that parents have to watch their children at all times. And when they sign in, they can’t leave their children unaccompanied, or drop them off and go home, he said.
   While most parents watch their kids and are in the pool with them – and even though he thinks the girl’s mother didn’t plan on taking her daughter into the pool – this incident, he said, proves how important it is to follow those rules.
   ”I guess there’s a lesson to be learned,” he said.
   But he’s noticed that since the incident occurred, everyone at the pool has been more careful, and necessarily so.
   The Robbinsville High School senior, who began working as a lifeguard for the first time this June, says he plans to continue lifeguarding, perhaps even through fall and winter and before he goes to college.
   He said the fact that he saved someone’s life hasn’t quite hit him yet.
   ”It’s something you don’t really experience that often,” he said.
   And he was just doing what he was trained to do.