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Mountain View Elementary thanks local heroes

Applause: Firefighters in Lacey helped to save boy

VENICE BUHAIN; The Olympian | • Published June 03, 2009

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LACEY – When Lacey fire crews were called to Mountain View Elementary earlier this year, the news was not good.

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Mountain View Elementary School honors its heroes

A third-grader, Phillip Peck, had collapsed on the playground, and his heart had stopped.

“It’s the type of call we all dread, having a child in cardiac arrest,” Lacey Fire Lt. Ron Pearsall said this week.

But on Tuesday, Phillip, 9, and the rest of Mountain View Elementary welcomed the Lacey firefighters back to their school as they thanked the fire department for saving his life.

Phillip said he was playing his favorite game, foursquare, with friends that April day when he fell down. He said one of his friends helped him up, but he fell again.

“It felt scary,” he said.

Principal Randy Weeks credited the paraeducators on playground duty, Jodi Boutin, Carol Brooks and Patty Parr, for tending to Phillip and supervising the other children still at recess.

“It was the scariest moment of my life,” Boutin said. “It’s like it happens to one of your own kids.”

Phillip was trying to breathe at first but stopped breathing as the Lacey medics were on their way, Parr said.

Lacey medics used a defibrillator and CPR to resuscitate the third-grader, who eventually was taken to Mary Bridge Hospital in Tacoma, Pearsall said.

“I was never so happy to see someone in my life,” Weeks said of the firefighters’ arrival that day.

Cardiologists had been seeing Phillip for a heart condition, said his mother, Aggie Peck. She said that the cardiac arrest was unexpected. The doctors at Mary Bridge gave Phillip a pacemaker, which can activate if his heart stops again, she said.

After a week in the hospital and another week at home recovering, Phillip returned to school, eager to get on the playground, she said.

“He wanted to get better so he could go out and play,” Peck said. “Every day, he was asking, ‘When can I go back to school?’”

Brooks, one of the paraeducators on duty, said that school staff members haven’t let Phillip out of their sight since his return.

“Just for his safety, and for our peace of mind,” she said.

As part of the school’s regular awards ceremony Tuesday, Weeks and the students thanked the firefighters and presented them with Mountain View T-shirts. Boutin, Brooks and Parr also received plaques for their actions. The Lacey Fire Department presented Phillip with a firefighter’s helmet.

Aggie Peck said that the entire school has been supportive of the family, which moved from Colorado in September when Phillip’s father, Howard, was stationed at Fort Lewis. His sister, Dellany, 16, goes to River Ridge High School.

When Phillip returned to the playground, Aggie Peck said, he could only play four square with one hand because his ribs were healing from the CPR and the surgery for the pacemaker.

“So all the kids that were playing with him also played with one hand,” she said.

Venice Buhain: 360-754-5445

vbuhain@theolympian.com

www.theolympian.com/edblog