Avery Artigo, a junior guard for the Santa Barbara High basketball team, was lifeguarding for the Santa Barbara Boys and Girls Club when it was discovered that a 10-year-old boy was laying motionless on the bottom of the Santa Barbara High School pool on Friday afternoon.
Artigo dove down 12 feet and brought the boy to the surface and helped get him onto the pool deck. The boy was unresponsive and not breathing and was beginning to turn blue.
Jalen Roberson (formerly Jalen Commodore), an SBHS graduate and former Dons football player who is training to become an EMT, began immediately performing CPR on the boy. After 30-35 seconds the boy began breathing again and was able to answer some basic questions by the time the paramedics arrived. The boy was taken to the hospital where he stayed the night and was released.
“I don’t really consider us heroes,” Roberson said in a KEYT News report. “We just did what we were taught to do, trained to do, so if anything I feel like we were just in the right place at the right time.”
Dons head coach David Bregante called them just that.
“Everyone at SBHS and the Boys and Girls club is thankful for Avery and Jalen’s quick actions that day,” Bregante said. “We are proud that Avery is one of our student athletes and plays basketball at Santa Barbara High. These guys are true heroes.”
It’s the same pool where Nick Johnson, a Dons alumni and UCSB water polo player, died after experiencing shallow water blackout in March of 2014. Since then, new safety rules have been adopted at the facility and money from the Nick Johnson Memorial Fund has been used for water safety education.
