An 80-year-old man was blue in the face after he collapsed face down while leaving the pool during an aquafit class at an LA Fitness in Glendora, and other gym members pulled him from the water, according to KTLA — until the club's manager dropped to her knees and started chest compressions. Rose Slocum says it took six rounds of CPR and use of an AED before he finally came back to them.
“You could tell that he wasn’t feeling well,” Slocum told KTLA. “He was starting to leave the pool when he dropped and ended up face down.” Other gym members rushed in and pulled him from the water, but by then he was already in trouble. “He was already blue in the face from drowning,” Slocum said.
Six Rounds of CPR Before He Started Breathing Again
Slocum began chest compressions and used an automated external defibrillator as the man's condition hung in the balance. After six rounds, she says, he finally began breathing again. Paramedics arrived soon after and took him to the hospital, as reported by KTLA.
Slocum later said the man's son stopped by to collect his father's belongings and reported that he was on the mend. For Slocum, who has now saved two lives at the gym by her own account, the outcome was the only thing that mattered. “I just wanted to know he was okay,” she said, according to the station's report.
Not Her First Save — or Her Only Reason to Stay Trained
This wasn't Slocum's first brush with a medical emergency on the job. Years earlier, she recalled, a man in his 70s suffered a heart attack inside a racquetball court at the same club, and she was able to revive him with CPR as well. She has stayed sharp on the skill for deeply personal reasons, too — she lost her father to a heart attack, and she has kept her training current partly because her own daughter once choked, as noted by KTLA.
Why Seconds Matter in a Drowning Emergency
Slocum's split-second response lines up with what researchers have found about bystander CPR more broadly. A U.S. observational study covering witnessed out-of-hospital cardiac arrests from 2013 to 2021 found a clear dose-response relationship between delays in starting CPR and survival, according to research published in ahajournals.org. Compared with CPR started within one minute, starting compressions two to three minutes later was linked to 9 percent lower odds of survival, and a four-to-five-minute delay was linked to 27 percent lower odds.
Not every pool emergency at a Southern California LA Fitness has ended the way Friday's did. A 63-year-old Covina man, identified as Te Lin, died after being pulled from the pool at an LA Fitness in West Covina, according to sgvcitywatch.com. In a separate incident, a 71-year-old woman died after being found in a pool at an LA Fitness in La Verne.
Friday's outcome in Glendora stands apart from those cases, with bystanders close enough to pull the man from the water immediately and a trained manager ready to act within moments. For Slocum, the stakes were never abstract. She has two children of her own, and by her account, the instinct to keep training never really goes away.
