May 07--SAUK RAPIDS -- Greg Bomstad has been on the Sauk Rapids Fire Department for 14 years. In that time, he's been thrust into many difficult circumstances -- including being among the first responders to a fatal accident involving a teenage girl a little more than a week ago.
But even Bomstad began to wonder if fate was working against him on Sunday morning. He was on vacation at the Holiday Inn Express waterpark in Baxter with his wife, their 5- and 1-year-old daughters, and his parents, when their joy in the pool was interrupted by the discovery of a lifeless 6-year-old boy under the water.
Bomstad realized something might be wrong when another father jumped into the pool near him and said, "Is this kid faking?"
"I didn't know what he was talking about until I looked and saw a kid on the bottom," said Bomstad, 39. "Young kids can sometimes hold their breath a long time, but I said he better grab him and see. I could tell from the moment he did the kid was unconscious. We got him out, and his lips were blue."
Bomstad called out to his father, a former Benton County sheriff's deputy, that he could find no pulse and was beginning CPR. Another bystander, Joe Pyrlik, who happened to be a 39-year-old firefighter from Esko, joined in and performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as Bomstad counted out chest compressions.
"It seemed like a long time, maybe 10 minutes, that we worked on him," Bomstad said. "Finally, we got a pulse, and it looked like he was getting some air. We turned him on his side, and he spit up a lot of water. By then, the ambulance got there and took him away."
Bomstad and the other firefighter were interviewed by Baxter police. They were thrilled to later find out that the boy, who is from Aitkin, was sitting up in the emergency room at the Brainerd hospital, talking to his nurse when the ambulance crew left.
"The first thing I was thinking when I saw that boy is 'You've got to be kidding? Not another child,' " said Bomstad, who grew up in the Watab Township area where 13-year-old Ellie Sovada -- a seventh-grader at Cathedral -- was killed in a car crash April 29 on U.S. Highway 10. "But then I guess I just got into the task at hand. We talked about it in the debriefing. It's one of those things where you're either wired different or you have an extra layer of skin or something because you can't stop to think when you have to act in a situation like that."
Afterward, however, the emotion crept closer to the surface. The child he helped save was close in age and size to his oldest daughter.
Sauk Rapids Fire Chief Tony Hommerding said he learned about Bomstad's rescue when they were fighting a grass fire on Sunday afternoon.
"He's an excellent firefighter," Hommerding said. "I'm so very proud of him."
Bomstad was somewhat reluctant at first to recount the events.
"I wear these colors," he said, referring to a fire department T-shirt, "not for any piece of paper (commendation) or for a newspaper article. I'm just glad we were there and the kid is OK."
Copyright 2013 - St. Cloud Times, Minn.
