Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 24, 1993 TAG: 9306240065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"You think, `God, don't let it be my child,' " she said later.
But it was her child - 5-year-old Travis Bryant.
He was drowning.
At the same time, a Navy aviation electrician who was home for Father's Day was spending the day on the river with friends.
Only a week earlier, the electrician - Herby Fitzgerald III - had learned resuscitation.
The newly gained knowledge was to save a life that day.
Browley and her husband, Charles, had been fishing for smallmouth bass and bluegill along the James. Travis, his brother William and the Browleys' niece, Dominic, waded in the shallows.
They'd been on the river since about 11 a.m., she said. Now, almost five hours later, the couple had told the children to return to their van, a few hundred yards away, to go back home to Bedford.
But Travis - "a mischievous 5-year-old," his mom said - saw two other boys and lingered around a boat ramp.
Then he fell in.
"Apparently no one knew he was in the water" for some time, Lillian Browley said. William, 10, saw his brother's shoes and someone saw his shirt, and then someone was yelling, "There's a kid in the water!"
Fitzgerald, 22, had just taken his life jacket off after spending the day jet-skiing on the river with Fitzgerald E.C. Bondurant, Anthony Wicks and others.
From shore, Wicks heard the yelling. He ran to the edge of the boat ramp and saw silt and leaves rising from under the water, then yelled to the others.
Already in the water, Bondurant, 28, dived but couldn't find the boy. He swam down the river a few yards.
"E.C. found him about a foot from the bottom, still kicking," Fitzgerald said.
But Bondurant needed air. He came to the surface, then dived again. Travis had drifted farther downstream. Bondurant swam another few yards and found Travis, his head a few inches from the bottom. The boy's body was limp.
"I don't know how I found that boy," said Bondurant, whose 5-year-old son, Ernie, had been playing with Travis and Wicks' son moments before.
Bondurant lifted Travis out of the water and handed him to Fitzgerald, who ran to level ground, cradling the boy.
"I knew his lungs were full of water by the way I was carrying him - water was coming out," Fitzgerald said.
Travis' lips and fingertips were blue, Fitzgerald said. He had a pulse but wasn't breathing.
Fitzgerald cleaned leaves and mud out of the boy's mouth and started performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
"I was saying, `Please don't die on me,' " recalled Fitzgerald, who has known three other people who died in the same stretch of river, between the Blue Ridge Parkway and Coleman Falls.
After four or five breaths, his prayers were answered. The boy coughed up a bit of water, then started screaming.
"It was the greatest feeling, man, in the world," said Fitzgerald, now back at the Naval Air Station in Norfolk. "First time I was glad to hear a kid screaming."
The Big Island Emergency Crew transported Travis to Lynchburg General Hospital.
In the middle of it all, Fitzgerald said, "I didn't get his name or anything - I was so shook up."
"All I can say is, `Thank him, and give him a helluva hug,' " Charles Browley said of the man who saved Travis.
Travis, nicknamed "Tray," is shy around strangers, but smiles with a wide, tooth-filled grin and glimmering green eyes.
He said to his mother, "You tell him," when asked to explain what happened. Then he hid behind her on the couch.
His mother said she went numb and completely cold when she ran up to find her boy barely breathing. "It was the worst feeling I've ever felt in my life."
Only two weeks ago, Travis had been to the hospital after falling out of a tree. His knee had needed stitches after he landed on glass.
But Sunday's brush was much, much worse.
"I still dream about it," she said. "If it wasn't for those men, my son would not have been alive."
She vowed - with the straightforward tone of a mother who has come terribly close to learning the ultimate lesson - to be more safety-conscious next time.
"Never again" will she assume her children have made it safely away from water. "If we go fishing again, they're going to have a vest, or I'm going to have a rope tied to them."
David Wray, captain of the rescue squad, said the boy must have been under water for several minutes.
"His chances would have been very slim" if not for the fast rescue, Wray said.
As it was, Travis rode with his mom in the back of the ambulance, screaming and "fighting like he was still in the water," she said. He vomited water when he got to the hospital. He was released that night.
His parents took him home, letting him munch on popcorn on the way. Travis went right to sleep when they got there.
"He slept good," Charles Browley said.
Lillian Browley and Travis talked to Fitzgerald on the telephone Wednesday. Fitzgerald said he plans to visit the boy when he comes home for the Fourth of July.
Travis said he's going to stay with his dad if he goes fishing again. Then he playfully covered his face with his hands, and said, "Thank you."
by CNB