Although 11 year old Gina Stearns is not that happy to be seen hugging her younger brother, Michael, this is a Valentine’s Day story. Gina may have saved her brother’s life on Sunday, Feb. 4 at the Fern Lake duck pond in Pine Mountain.

While their grandparents went shopping for groceries, Gina and Michael, 7, walked down to feed the ducks with their uncle, Jon Stearns. He told them not to go on the ice, grandmother DeeDee McNatt relates. “Gina was talking to her uncle when Michael suddenly ran to the edge of the ice after the ducks and fell in,” McNatt relates.

“Michael was seven feet away from the shore on the south side of the pond,” McNatt reported, adding that the ice is three inches thick at the edge near the shore and one inch thick where it broke.

“I ran as fast as I could, bent over to yank him out by his arms, and dragged him half way back because he wasn’t getting up,” Gina told her grandmother.

The El Tejon student removed her brother’s wet shirt and wrapped him in an extra sweater. “She couldn’t figure out why she had taken an extra sweater; afterward we thought it was fore-ordained,” McNatt said, adding “She is fast-thinking. Hypothermia was the risk there.”

A family who live near the pond, “wrapped him up in a blanket and brought them home in their car,” McNatt added, saying she is very grateful. Michael is back at Frazier Park School in second grade and seems fine.

This is part of the February 09, 2007 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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