A dive team rescued a 13-year-old boy after he fell into a canal in northwest Miami-Dade on Tuesday afternoon.
Authorities reported that around 4:00 p.m. they received an emergency call warning of a possible drowning in the Little River Canal, in the 100 block of Northwest 85th Street, an unincorporated area of West Little River, the media reported. Local 10.
A man who tried to save the young man with an oar when he saw that he could not reach him called 911 to report that the boy He had gone into the water and did not come out again, a Miami-Dade police spokesperson explained.
Surveillance video shows the teen behind a house along Northwest 85th Street with a friend.
At one point the young man urinates on the property and then runs away and jump into the water.
Seconds later he is seen struggling and screaming, which alerted several residents of the building who tried to rescue him first with a paddle and then with a canoe.
Property manager Paul Stoppelwerth said his roommate was the one who reached out for the paddle, but the teen couldn’t reach it and sank into the water. the channel. Then the man “called 911.”
Paramedics took the boy to Jackson Memorial Hospital where he was stabilized, according to testimony from the aunt, Natasha Rogers.
The woman told the aforementioned news outlet that the child had a pulse and had been stabilized at the medical center early Tuesday evening.
Its current status is unknown.
Episodes of falls and drownings of children in rivers, canals, ponds and beaches in Florida have been frequent in recent months.
Last July, Miami police officer Ernesto Fernández, a Cuban national, rescued an autistic child who had fallen into the city’s river.
Fernández was patrolling the Allapattah neighborhood when he saw a minor running in the Marina area, on the Miami River, and followed him instinctively. He suddenly saw him struggling to stay afloat after having fallen into the water.
A week before this incident, Miami-Dade police found a three-year-old boy unconscious in a canal near his home in the southwest of the county. Although he was taken to the hospital in critical condition, he died at the medical facility.
Days before, in Hillsborough County, two agents managed to save the life of a four-year-old child with autism, after a harrowing rescue in a pond where the little boy was trying to stay afloat in the bushes.
A girl of the same age who also suffered from autism, who was found dead on the bank of a canal behind the rental house where she lived with her family, in Port Charlotte, did not suffer the same fate.
