A 9-year-old girl nearly drowned Sept. 2 while playing in the Gulf of Mexico at Cortez Beach in Bradenton Beach.
The child was swimming with her brother, when the two became caught in a rip current, according to rescuer Will Parard.
Parard, a chef for the Anna Maria Oyster Bar family of restaurants, was fishing that day from a jetty at Cortez Beach.
What started as a quiet afternoon of fishing turned into a rescue.
“It was pretty slow, no bites, there wasn’t anybody really swimming in the water between tower 2 and tower 3. I was there for maybe 15-20 minutes,” he said.
“I was in a daydream and heard somebody screaming. I looked up and saw the mom, who was out waist-deep in the water, screaming, ‘My son needs help!’” he recalled.
“I saw a boy with a pool float caught in a riptide near the end of the jetty. He had almost made it out past the end of the jetty,” Parard said. “The swell was heavy; the current was ripping.”
He and another man, Ray Arica, jumped off the jetty to help the boy.
Parard said the Arica reached the boy first.
As they began to swim the boy to shore, the child asked his rescuers about his sister.
There was no girl on the surface nearby.
The men started looking underwater and Arica noticed a child’s foot sinking out of view. He pulled the unconscious girl from under the surface and gave her to Parard.
While Arica set out swimming with the boy to shore, Parard said he began swimming against the current to get the girl to medical attention.
“I didn’t even think about the riptide and I just started swimming as hard as I could towards shore, straight in.”
Parard said as soon as he got close to shore people came running.
“I just started screaming for help and the two guys who ran down the beach just happened to be doctors,” Parard said.
“They grabbed her from me, flipped her upside down and she immediately started dumping sand and water out of her mouth and nose,” he said.
“The ambulance showed up very quickly and in a matter of minutes and I could hear them talking to her.”
Manatee County’s beach patrol and emergency medical services teams responded, along with the Bradenton Beach Police Department.
The girl regained consciousness but only partially.
Paramedics determined she required transport by trauma helicopter to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg. She was taken by EMS to the Coquina North Boat Ramp to meet the medical helicopter.
The police report stated the girl was in critical condition upon her arrival at All Children’s but Bradenton Beach Police Lt. Lenard Diaz told The Islander Sept. 7 that the child was stable and expected to fully recover.
“I am just so thankful that I was there in that moment,” Parard said. He told The Islander Sept. 10 that he felt as though people involved in the rescue were in the right place at the right time.
“From him pulling her up, to me being able to swim through the riptide, to there being two doctors on the beach to take her out of my arms, to the ambulance being so fast. It was an amazing set of circumstances that allowed her to survive,” he said.
Asked how he felt to have saved a life, Parard responded: “It’s all still setting in. It was a life-changing experience and I look at the world a lot brighter now.”
