College Student Who Just Learned CPR Saves Boy's Life

Ryan Kilgore doesn’t consider himself a hero.

He’s about the only one who thinks that.

Kilgore, 21, was working out at an apartment gym in Northville Monday when he heard a dad’s panicked shouts coming from the pool area. His 3-year-old son had wiggled out of his floatation device and was drowning.

“The father was in shock, asking what to do, what to do,” Kilgore, a physical therapy student at Wayne State University, told WXYZ-TV.

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Kilgore sprinted into action, his instincts propelling him. In an instant, he was at the boy’s side, taking charge. He told the boy’s father to lay him flat, and then began CPR, a technique he had only learned a few months prior.

He performed the technique for four minutes. It seemed like a lifetime. The boy’s eyes were rolled back in his head.

“I was thinking, ‘I have to save this kid,’ ” Kilgore told the TV station. “I’m not letting him go on my hands.”

“If it wasn’t for the quick action of the bystander, who knows what may have happened,” Marinucci said.

The boy, whose name Kilgore didn’t catch, was dismissed from the hospital after a brief stay, fully recovered, Marinucci said.

Anyone would have done the same thing, Kilgore maintains. “I just did what I was trained” to do, he said.

Perhaps, but the Northville Township Fire Department honored him anyway with a lifesaving award at a special ceremony Thursday.