Heroic lifeguard Emily Harms, 21 years-old, saved an 11-year-old boy’s life who was drowning in a Queens pool. Click below for the story.

Melissa Nash

One Queens swimmer was lucky to have been in Harms’ way on Wednesday.
Heroic lifeguard Emily Harms helped save an 11-year-old boy who was drowning in a Glen Oaks pool packed with Fourth of July swimmers.
The child, who was not identified, was splashing around with pals at the shallow end of the Royal Ranch
Club pool when Harms heard a sudden cry for help about 1:15 p.m.
Freckle-faced Harms, 21, saw that the boy was underwater in the 3-feet-deep end of the pool.
“They thought he was just playing around and then he wouldn’t come up for air,” Harms told the Daily News. “I ran over there.”
The child’s mother leaped into the pool and pulled her son’s limp body out of the water as another lifeguard blew a whistle to clear the area.
“He wasn’t breathing,” Harms said. “I started doing rescue breathing and then started CPR.”
Chris Russo, a retired NYPD sergeant, also rushed over to help the unconscious child.
“He was blue,” said Russo, 53. “He was technically dead.”
Someone called 911, but the boy started coughing up water before emergency crews responded.
“We put him on his side,” Harms said. “He started throwing up.”
A team of EMTs soon arrived and took the boy to Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He was expected to make a full recovery, a family friend said at the hospital.
“He’s fine,” the friend said.
Friends said the boy — who was visiting with his mother, a friend of one of the residents — has a history of seizures and may have had one while playing in the water with his friends.
“We were just swimming underwater and having fun and then he wouldn’t move,” said the boy’s pal, 12-year-old Lauren Wolf. “He was upside down . . . He wouldn’t move.”
Wolf said she sensed something wrong and immediately called for help.
“I was pretty scared,” she said. “I hopped out of the pool as quick as I (could) and called the mom over.”
When the frantic mother pulled the boy out of the water, Wolf sensed the worst.
“He wasn’t moving and his lips were purple.”
Harms, who is from Bellerose and studying elementary and special education at Providence College in Rhode Island, said the save was her first rescue in the six summers she has worked at the pool.
“It was scary,” she said. “But you don’t have time to really think about it.”