Ten-year-old twins Bridon and Christian Hassig had never tried CPR themselves, but they knew what it looked like, based on scenes from movies including Hook and The Sandlot. That came in extremely handy on June 14, when their father—the only adult at their home in Mountain Brook, Ala.—didn't resurface in the family pool and started turning blue. Brad Hassig recalls his sons and a 11-year-old neighbor were "having fun" swimming when he went underwater for a meditation exercise—something he does regularly without issue. "I was saying the Lord's Prayer," he says, per ABC News. "And I just, I don't ever remember finishing it."
The boys soon noticed their dad was slumped over at the bottom of the pool. "I could see his face was starting to turn blue," Christian tells the Washington Post. From there, "we were just focusing on saving our dad's life." "They shouldn't have been able to physically do what they did," Hassig tells ABC of the 80-pound twins. Helped by neighbor Sam, they pulled 185-pound Hassig to the surface at the pool steps. Then, as Christian and Sam ran to get help, Bridon tilted his father's head back and began chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth, recalling what he'd seen on screen. "I just knew I need to do this," he tells the Post.
When Hassig came to, coughing up foam, blood, and water, "I hear the boys saying, you know, 'Daddy, come back!' and 'Daddy, you have to be OK!'" he says. Even Bridon was amazed at the boys' actions. "I just had a moment when Jesus was sitting right behind us the whole time," he tells WBMA. Haig, diagnosed with hypoxia and pulmonary edema, spent a day in a hospital's intensive care unit. He says he'll no longer be doing meditation exercises underwater. But he is planning a community-wide CPR training course for adults and children, hoping to "potentially be able to save another life." "You never know if that could happen to you," Christian tells the Post. "It helps to know what to do." (More uplifting news stories.)
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