“We were watching these two kids in the water and we thought they
were playing,” she recalls. “Then my mother came down, and I said ‘I
think those two kids are drowning,’ but my mother said she thought
they were only playing.”Just then, the young boy got enough air to scream “help” and
Rebecca immediately jumped into the pool. She brought him over to
the side and got him out of the pool with her mother’s help.
“That was when he started screaming: ‘my sister, my sister,”
Rebecca continues. “I looked and saw she was floating toward the
bottom of the pool. I dove in the water and pulled her to the side –
she wasn’t moving or breathing, so it was hard to get her out.”
With her mother pulling, and Rebecca pushing, both faced a
massive obstacle as the young girl became stuck between the ladder
and the pool wall. After her mother screamed for help, a boy jumped
over the pool fence and helped them pull the child out.
Then, with the girl lying face down, lifeless and not breathing,
Rebecca again fearlessly went into action.
“I don’t even know how I did it, she was face down and I started
hitting her on the back. I whacked her on the back a few times –
then she threw up water and started breathing.”
Although a member of the Pembroke Swim Team the past five years,
Rebecca had never learned lifesaving or CPR. She credits her
adrenalin and instincts for doing what she did to save the young
girl’s life.
“Her instincts took over I guess, and it was very amazing to see
her do all that – because she saved not one life but two, and she
did it with no hesitation,” her mother Barbara Conley said during
the interview. “She just kept going and then had a meltdown later.”
Now, all Rebecca knows of the two siblings is that the sister was
12 years old and the brother was 8. They were on vacation with their
grandparents and are from Georgia. While neither grandparent was at
the pool when the incident happened, Rebecca says that the
grandmother thanked her afterward.
After the 911 call, an ambulance arrived and the girl was taken
by Med-flight to a Tampa hospital. And how did the EMTs respond to
Rebecca’s heroism?
“I was really upset and I was crying. The EMTs told me that was a
really good job I did and I should consider myself a hero. And
people I didn’t know were coming up and hugging me.”
The police did take a statement from her and she says she had to
fill out a police report.
But that wasn’t the end to Rebecca’s emotional response to having
saved two lives. “My adrenalin had taken over. I couldn’t believe
what had happened. I was like crying all night and I couldn’t calm
down.”
She had already called two of the important people in her life,
one of her best friends, Kayla MacDonald, who she has known since
kindergarten, and her oldest brother Brian Palmucci.
“I was so upset, I called my friend Kayla, and she was calming me
down, saying, ‘I can’t believe you did it, I’m so proud of
you.” Then she called Brian, “He’s an awesome brother. I’m actually
thinking of becoming a lawyer because of him.”
Now, while still becoming teary as she tells her story, Rebecca
says, “I’m so proud of myself. I still can’t get over how I saved
two children’s lives and, if I wasn’t there, that little girl could
have died.”
And her mother adds: “How lucky they were because of her.”
Now that she’s back in Pembroke, Rebecca is committed to her many
activities and her future goals. She is a cheerleader for the Holy
Family basketball team, had played softball in Pembroke three years,
and will again be swimming on the Pembroke Swim Team. She also
enjoys dancing, had taken lessons two years, and will be performing
in “Godspell” at Holy Family School next weekend, May 18 and 19.
“I love drama, it’s so much fun.”
Currently, she is raising money to defray costs of a one-week
mission trip to the Dominican Republic at the end of July, a mission
sponsored by St. Mary’s Church in Hanover. Rebecca will be selling
candy to raise the $900 for this trip, where participants will spend
the week helping to build homes for the poor.
“Holy Family definitely makes me want to do more good for the
world,” she says with a lot of sincerity.
Her high school plans are to try out for the swim and softball
teams, and to participate in the drama club. She’s also hoping to
participate in Cardinal Spellman’s Mock Trial Team, in hopes of
learning more about what it might be like to be an attorney.
But most of all, at the young age of 14, Rebecca is a typical
teen that loves spending time with her friends. “I love my friends –
my friends mean the world to me,” she says.
Holy Family Church
