Three boys save a stranger’s life

It was a spring day and Kyle, Ross and Tyler were getting pizza for lunch at the McDonalds Plaza near their high school in Grimsby. Just as they were about to sit down to eat, a man ran up to them asking them to call 911. “He told us he found a man unconscious in his car,” recall the boys.

Quickly, they called 911 and followed the man towards the plaza’s parking lot, to find a stranger collapsed over the steering wheel of his car. Tyler was on the phone with 911 while Kyle checked for the man’s vital signs. “He wasn’t breathing and had no pulse, so I started CPR,” tells Kyle who continued the compressions until the arrival of the paramedics.

“I knew the paramedics would want to identify the man,” recalls Ross who had been trained through the ACT High School CPR Program. “I was thinking that he must have his insurance papers in his car, and so I handed them the papers.”

The incident left the boys emotional, in hopes that the stranger they did CPR on was saved. And so Ross took the initiative to call the hospital. “They told me he was alive. They said he had died and that Kyle brought him back to life with CPR.” Ross adds “We did what we needed to do and got the job done.”

The ACT High School CPR and AED program was set up in Blessed Trinity Catholic Secondary School in 2009 in partnership with Heart Niagara and grade 9 students who receive the CPR training prior to graduation. The donation of the training equipment and materials was made possible thanks to the support of First Ontario Credit Union, the Government of Ontario, Hydro One and Ontario Trillium Foundation and ACT’s national health partners, AstraZeneca Canada, Pfizer Canada and Sanofi Canada.

The Advanced Coronary Treatment (ACT) Foundation is an award-winning, national charitable organization dedicated to establishing CPR and AED training programs in high schools across Canada. ACT raises funds to donate mannequins and teacher training to schools, and guides schools in program set-up and long-term sustainability. Over 3.2 million youth have been trained in CPR by their teachers through this lifesaving program to date.