In Ashburnham, Massachusetts, a 17-year-old lifeguard has been deemed a hero after he conducted an impressive double duty rescue mission
Jeremy Lessard had been hired to lifeguard at a family reunion on Sunset Lake.
Casually monitoring the reunion, Lessard was suddenly asked to do something he never had to do before.
A woman approached him to ask if he could save her dog. By this time, the dog had swam nearly half a mile away.
“She was like can somebody help my dog, and was like yeah, I’ll go swim after it,” said Jeremy Lessard.
It didn’t take Lessard long to realize that he wasn’t able to catch up with the dog. He made a quick decision to swim to another shore and ask to borrow a canoe.
“I paddled out. There was a pontoon boat traveling on my left and I was like, ‘hey, go and help me get that dog,’” said Lessard.
Wanting to help, the man in the pontoon boat jumped into the water. As the man went to grab the dog, the leash slipped out of his fingers.
“I got to the dog, I could see that it was struggling. It was starting to go underwater a little bit. It was really tired so I grabbed it on my left hand, tried to scoop it up. I didn’t know heavy it was.”
Frightened and panicked, the dog bit Lessard.
“I just reached in again, I didn’t want the dog to drown. I grabbed the dog again and it bit me twice as I was getting back in the boat. I got it in the boat.”
Now dealing with an injury, Lessard also had another rescue to do. The man who had jumped into the water off the pontoon boat was out of breath. The man’s wife was concerned that her husband may have been having another heart attack.
“It was kinda like an adrenaline high at that point.”
“He was panting. He was really pale. Holding on to the lifejacket, he wasn’t moving,”
Lessard managed to rescue the 60-year-old man as well. Everyone, including the dog, Kera, made it safely back to shore.
“I don’t feel like I was any sort of hero. I was just doing what I was trained to do,” said Lessard.
