4-Year-Old Who 'Dry Drowned' Saves Another Boy's Life

After 4-year-old Frankie Delgado died days after swimming from what doctors suspect was a case of "dry drowning," his parents shared his story in the hopes of warning other parents. It worked: A 2-year-old boy in Houston might have met the same fate, were it not for the fact that his parents had heard about what happened to Frankie. Staff Sgt. Garon Vega tells KTRK that when his young son Gio swallowed water while swimming and later got a fever and started having trouble breathing, he remembered Frankie's story and immediately took Gio to the ER—where a doctor told him that had he not, his son likely would not have survived the night.

"I feel like I needed to reach out to the parents of little Frankie and tell them, I don't know how to word it, but their little boy saved our little boy's life," Vega says. "If I had not told my wife that he swallowed the water, and if she had not seen that article, I think we would've ended up dispelling it as a regular sickness." (Click for more on Frankie's story and the symptoms of dry or secondary drowning.)