Who is Tom Westerhaus? Video shows hero dad saving neighbor's autistic son, 4, from drowning
A hero Kansas man was caught on camera saving his neighbor's autistic son, 4, from drowning. Tom Westerhaus, of Lawrence, was seen pulling the child out of a pool and performing CPR for nearly three minutes. When Westerhaus' 12-year-old son Maddox came looking for help for Xavier, who was drowning, the father wasted no time.
Westerhaus rushed to his apartment complex's pool area and immediately jumped a fence to pull Xavier from the water. Surveillance footage captured the incident, which took place on May 18, showing Westerhaus giving CPR for two minutes and forty-one seconds to the autistic, nonverbal child.
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"When he started to cough up water... I knew it was a good sign," Westerhaus said, as reported by the Daily Mail. Alexis Reign, Xavier's mother, said she could not fathom what would have happened had Westerhaus not been there to save her child. "I don't know what I would have done if [Maddox] wouldn't have been in the pool and hadn't seen [Xavier]," she said. Both Westerhaus and Maddox have been given Hometown Hero awards on behalf of the Lawrence Fire Medical Department for their heroic deeds. Xavier is now fully recovered.
On May 18, Reign went to the bathroom and then to pick up her four-month-old daughter, who was crying. She came back and realized Xavier was nowhere to be found. "So I went to his room and checked and he wasn't there," she said at a press conference where Westerhaus and his son received their awards. "I went to the living room because he plays in the living room, that's where the TV is, and he wasn't there but the door was open."
❤Llegó justo a tiempo: este vecino logró salvar a este niño de 4 años que se ahogaba en una piscina.
— Radio Sudamericana (@rsudamericana) May 30, 2022
Tom Westerhaus no dudó en lanzarse luego de que su hijo le dijo que un niño se estaba ahogando. pic.twitter.com/lDd8W6nUXL
Maddox later found Xavier lying motionless in the pool. Authorities said that the boy lay in the water for three minutes and twenty-two seconds. "My friends were yelling at me to go get help and I just went like ''oh no'' and ran," Maddox said. Soon after, Reign spotted sirens and emergency vehicles approaching the building complex.
"I didn't see anybody but I could see the paramedics and fire department going into the back of the building so I followed them and Xavier was being pulled out of the pool," she said. "But I didn't see him moving so I didn't know he was okay at the time." Reign said she since learned that autistic children are especially drawn to water bodies.
"A lot of autistic kids, they love large bodies of water, pools, lakes and like the ocean. I didn't know until I was in the hospital, they let me know a lot of information about autistic kids," she said. National Drowning Prevention League says that children with autism are ten times more likely to drown.