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Saturday, July 26, 2025

Why no CPR from lifeguards?

by

20160907

Tiffany George, sis­ter of drowned vic­tim Jav­el James, 23, yes­ter­day be­lieves the life­guards on du­ty at Mara­cas Bay could have done more in an at­tempt to save her broth­er.She was mak­ing ref­er­ence to a video that was post­ed on the so­cial me­dia site Face­book.

That video showed James' seem­ing life­less body was tak­en out of the wa­ter and placed on a body board. The video al­so showed life­guards lift­ing him and plac­ing him on an­oth­er body board and run­ning with it to a life­guard am­bu­lance.

The video which had over 130,000 views had many com­ments in which view­ers ar­gued the point that no one there did CPR on James in an at­tempt to re­sus­ci­tate him.How­ev­er, life­guards who were on du­ty on Sun­day claimed that a doc­tor was on the beach.

But speak­ing with the T&T Guardian yes­ter­day, George said the video showed a lot.

"They told us they did CPR but when we looked at the video we didn't see any­thing like that. They told us a hos­pi­tal am­bu­lance came for him but we saw in the video that they put him in a life­guard am­bu­lance which would have tak­en him to the hos­pi­tal.

"We heard that a doc­tor was on the beach but we didn't see that in the video," she added.

George said the fam­i­ly, strick­en with grief, were at a point where they did not know what to be­lieve any­more.She al­so said the fam­i­ly was still wait­ing to speak to the per­son from the hik­ing group, Hik­ers Inc, which took James to the area on Sun­day to come for­ward and speak with them.

"All we want is clo­sure. That is all Jav­el's moth­er, Ju­lian­na, is ask­ing for," George said.

Pres­i­dent of the Life­guards Branch, Au­gus­tus Sylvester, said yes­ter­day there was a doc­tor avail­able on the beach.

"Based on what I un­der­stand when they used the board to put him on the am­bu­lance there was a doc­tor who was on land. There was no need for the life­guards to do any­thing there," he said.

Sylvester said he did not know who the doc­tor was.He said it was un­for­tu­nate as James had been bathing in waist-high wa­ter when the in­ci­dent oc­curred.

"But the oth­ers saw him (James) be­ing dragged out with the cur­rent and the life­guards ran in as well," he added.

Sylvester said the wa­ter was sandy and dirty and the life­guards had two feet of vis­i­bil­i­ty which was a prob­lem.

"So it was hard to lo­cate him," he said.He said in light of the nu­mer­ous drown­ings every year sev­er­al cit­i­zens have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to learn to swim.He added there were sev­er­al pro­grammes, from wa­ter ba­bies to com­pet­i­tive swim­ming, of­fered at sev­er­al fa­cil­i­ties in T&T.


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