JOSHUASTEPHEN

Sunday was so beautiful that Stephen and Robin Zasowski, of Bristol, decided to camp an extra day with their four children at Burlingame State Park, in Charlestown.

Sherry Sherman, of Charlestown, who has taught cardiopulmonary resuscitation for 20 years but never used it in an emergency, went to the Watchaug Pond swimming area with her daughter.

Because of those decisions, a New York man is alive today.

Leo R. Daigneault, who goes by his middle name of Roger, was camping last weekend with friends from outside Albany, N.Y. On Sunday, he was pulled blue and unresponsive onto the beach and resuscitated twice. Last night he was in serious condition for the second day in the trauma-intensive care unit of Rhode Island Hospital.

“If Joshua hadn’t seen him and called the lifeguard,” Stephen Zasowski said yesterday about his 11-year-old son who saw Daigneault go under and not come up, “we may not have been able to resuscitate the man in time. . . . As a father, I’m proud of what he did.”

Joshua told about his experience last night. He said he and his father had found a pile of rocks in deep water of Watchaug Pond’s swimming area on Saturday. They could stand on the rocks and keep their heads out of the water, even though the pond bottom was 8 or 9 feet deep there.

He told Daigneault about the rocks. “I was talking to the guy for, like, three minutes,” Joshua said. “I showed him where the big rocks were, so he brought his nephew out there with him.” The boy, whom Joshua estimated was about 9, was riding on the man’s back.

“When we got out there, I was holding onto the buoys and he just started going under. He disappeared.

“It looked like the man was just about to go sleep,” Joshua said. “All I see is his face in the water, and he didn’t come back up.

“I didn’t see him for about 30 seconds or something.”

The other boy screamed the man’s name.

“And then I see him floating up. I start yelling: Lifeguard! Lifeguard!

“I was really scared,” Joshua said. “He was really, really blue, like purplish.”

Stephen Zasowski, 36, a former lifeguard in New Jersey, had just rejoined his wife on the beach after swimming with the children, Joshua, Victoria, 8, and the twins, Justin and Jacob, 7.

“My wife heard my son scream for help, screaming for the lifeguard. I saw him flailing his arms in the air,” he said. “Instinctively, as a father, I dove in.” DEM lifeguard Albert A. Dinwoodie, 20, dove in, too, and both men swam toward Joshua.

Other swimmers took the distraught 9-year-old to shore. Zasowski said he realized his son wasn’t in trouble, and then saw a man face-down in the water about 10 feet away. Zasowski and Dinwoodie turned the man over and pulled him to the beach.

“The lifeguard immediately started mouth to mouth,” the elder Zasowski said. “I was getting ready to start chest compressions,” but Sherman, the CPR teacher, “tapped me on the shoulder. I backed off then and there and just helped keep everybody at bay while the nurse and lifeguard were reviving.”

The next morning, as the family was packing up camp, a park ranger arrived to speak with Joshua. “She talked to him, congratulated him on being a hero” and gave him DEM and Parks and Recreation patches. Joshua said he worried that he had done something wrong by calling for a lifeguard when he wasn’t in danger. He also remembers being afraid. “Your heart is racing and your eyes are wide open, so scared and stuff. That’s how I felt.”

dnaylor@projo.com