Boy rescued after falling into pond.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran June 16, 2007): A story on Page D1 on Thursday about a boy pulled from a pond east of Springfield misspelled Jodie Muller's first name.

SPRINGFIELD - A 5-year-old boy is in critical condition after falling into a fish pond on Wednesday afternoon.

Quick-thinking neighbors pulled the boy from the murky water about 10 or 15 minutes after he first went missing about 4 p.m. at his home at 38713 McKenzie Highway, said Paul Vitus, a Lane County sheriff marine patrol deputy.

The incident began when the child's grandmother, who was taking care of him, stepped inside off the back porch of the house to get ice cream for the two. When she came back outside, the boy had disappeared, said neighbor Lorenzo Muller.

Muller, a retired electrical supervisor, said he was mowing his lawn when the child's grandmother came looking for him.

"This guy is a little ball of fire," Muller said of the boy. `He lives next door. He's always asking, `Why you doin' this? Why you doin' that?' When she told me he was missing, I went looking.'

Muller headed down toward the McKenzie River, fearing the worst and calling for the boy. Then, for some reason, he called his wife, Joni, who was in town, on his cell phone and told her the boy had gone missing.

"She said, 'Did you look in the pond?' So I came from the river and I looked and saw him. I jumped in and grabbed him and passed him off to his grandmother."

It took several minutes for Muller and another neighbor who had jumped in to get out of the pond because of its slick bottom and edges. By then another neighbor, John Phelps - a medic with a private helicopter transport company - had come over.

The boy wasn't breathing and his heart had stopped, so the two men began cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

"I was doing chest compressions. John was doing the breathing, and we pumped water out of him," Muller said.

They continued for at least five minutes until the ambulance arrived and whisked the boy away.

He was first taken to McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center, Vitus said. From there he was flown to Legacy Emmanuel Children's Hospital in Portland.

A nursing supervisor confirmed that he was in critical condition on Wednesday night.

"If anyone with children has these types of ponds, they should always watch them," Muller said. "If not, they should have some sort of PFD (personal flotation device) on them because it can happen just that quick."