By Gretchen Keiser

Who hasn’t wondered how he would respond in an emergency?

In a few moments, at a swimming pool last summer, 16-year-old Collier Slade of Dunwoody found out. He and his sister had just arrived at the Cherokee County Club last July 13 and he was standing with friends at the side of the pool.

He noticed someone or something at the bottom of the deep end of the pool. A friend pushed him into the pool. Collier swam to the side and hopped out. The he realized that the “dark object” at the bottom of the deep end of the pool hadn’t moved.

Collier dove to the bottom, and when he came up he had in his arms, two-year-old Rick Shelly.

No one is really sure what happened, but the child had wandered away from the baby pool, in a brief moment while his mother’s eye was turned to her other children. When Collier pulled him from the pool, Rick was unconscious, his body blue.

Calling for help, Collier started resuscitation he had learned in Boy Scout and Red Cross training. Mrs. Albert McConkie, a friend and a nurse, rushed over and started cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the child, and Collier alternated with her. “He started coughing right away,” Collier said, “after I put two or three breaths into him.” But, remembering from training that it was important to continue resuscitation, and unsure whether or not the child was breathing on his own, they kept at it until paramedics arrived. Rick spent a day in the hospital, but his life had been saved in those quick moments at the pool.

In recognition of that, Collier, a member of St. Jude’s Parish and its Scout Troop No. 623 led by Paul Bornstein, has been awarded the National Medal of Merit, an honor given for exceptional action by a Scout which shows the worth of his training. The award given to Collier said his “alertness and coolheaded actions saved Rick Shelly’s life and demonstrated the value of his Boy Scout training.”

A Star Scout, which is two ranks below the Eagle, Collier has been in scouting since he was eleven and had received the scouts’ lifesaving medal badge. He had also taken the Red Cross lifesaving course, but had been too young to receive certification. All that training, plus a scuba course he was taking, really taught him what to do and what not to do, Collier said. A lot of the training, he said, is “just preparing yourself not to panic” in an emergency.

When he received his award at a Court of Honor at St. Jude’s, the entire Shelly family came, too. The award was recently re-presented at an Atlanta-Area Boy Scout Council Banquet. And Collier, a junior at Marist High School, received the Louis H. Beck Award, a local scouting honor, for his actions.

However, he credits Mrs. McConkie, whose training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation was critical.

Of his own actions, Collier says that the training is important; when the moment arrives, he said. “You don’t even think about it. You just do it.”