FARGO, N.D.— Alvaro Garza Jr., still remembers the day 20 years ago when he was saved from the Red River.
The 11-year-old boy became known as a Christmas miracle after he survived 45 minutes in the icy water.
“I still remember it every year,” said Garza, now 31 and the father of four children. He works as a driller on a Texas oil rig.
“I’m the one that makes the holes. I make $23 an hour, pretty good money,” he said.
One of his children, 10-year-old Alvaro Garza III, nearly drowned about six years ago on a family trip to a state park in Texas, he said. The boy was pulled from a river, much as his father was two decades ago, he said.
Garza said he tells his children to respect the water and not take chances like the one he took after three companions dared him to venture out onto the ice to claim a dead squirrel for its tail.
Rescuers arrived a few minutes after Garza went in the Red River on Dec. 4, 1987, but it took longer for police and firefighters to find his body deep under the ice.
Steve Kennedy, a rookie officer with the Moorhead, Minn., Police Department at the time, recalled that he maneuvered the boat while firefighters combed the water with long poles. After Garza was found, “everybody grabbed him, and then it was just a mad rush for shore and the ambulance and away he went,” Kennedy said.
The boy, whose core body temperature had dropped to 77 degrees, was hooked to a heart-lung machine.
“They were able to take his blood and warm it up and put it right back in his body,” said Roberta Young, a registered nurse at MeritCare Hospital in Fargo.
The extreme cold of the water actually helped the boy’s chances by triggering an oxygen-conserving response that shut down all but the body’s most critical functions, she said.
“When you’re caring for children, their resiliency is sometimes really quite astounding,” Young said.
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Information from: The Forum, http://www.in-forum.com
