David Murray

dmurray@greatfallstribune.com

The cool, clear waters of Warm Spring Creek slide past banks lined with chokecherry and willow bushes. On a warm summer’s day the creek’s sparkling waters draw people in like a magnet. On July 9 that included a very small boy – and the women downstream who would save his life.

Darci Gillen Dawson, 42, grew up in Lewistown, though she and her family had long since moved to Snoqualmie, a small city in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle.

For 50 years her family, the Gillens, have owned a cabin on Warm Spring Creek, about 15 miles outside of Lewistown. It remains a favorite family getaway.

Darci had returned to Montana on vacation just a few days earlier. Her three kids had been splashing in the creek all afternoon, and her brother was scheduled to arrive at any moment.

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With just a few minutes to spare before the rest of her family arrived, Darci slipped down to the water to cool off. Ready to walk back to the cabin, she paused for a second and looked back over her shoulder at the creek.

There, at the edge of her vision, a small body floated by. It could have been mistaken for a piece of trash – perhaps some driftwood or a forgotten child’s toy. But it wasn’t a toy, this was a real child – a small boy dressed in a diaper, shorts and a T-shirt.

He floated by at the edge of Darci’s line of sight, arms and legs spread loosely in the stream, eyes half open starring up through the water at the sky.

“I could not believe what I was seeing,” she said. “He was face-up, probably five inches under water. He wasn’t on top or struggling or doing anything. He was just floating, actually, sadly enough, very peacefully. I just said, 'Oh my God’ and ran down the stream.”

“He was moving with the stream, underwater quickly,” Darci said of the moment. “By the time I turned and glanced over my shoulder he was already past. He’d floated under our bridge and was already down a ways.”

There was no time to make a plan or turn to someone else for help. Darci ran down the creek to catch up with the small, drifting body. She shouted to her parents: first to call 911 and then to make sure her own three children were back in the cabin away from the shoreline. She didn’t want her own children to witness what might be a traumatizing event.

At that same instant, the Peterson family upstream from the Gillens was frantically searching for 18-month-old Kaden Sluggett.

According to a story from the Lewistown News-Argus, Kaden’s mother, Jessica Newton, was helping her sister prepare a birthday dinner while Kaden played with his tractors on a gravel pile near the creek.

In a moment he was gone. It was every parents’ worst nightmare.

The Peterson family raced through their cabin and up and down the creek looking for the missing toddler. Their desperate call to 911 came just seconds before Darci’s father, Tim Gillen, called Fergus County Emergency Dispatch to report his daughter had found a baby in the creek.

When Darci reached the little boy, she scooped him up from under the water. The baby’s skin was gray and cold to the touch. His lips were blue.

“I had to just run upstream in the water,” she said. “I was just carrying him right up the stream until I could get him to a place where I could put him down and started working on him. There was no heartbeat, no breathing. It was just awful, awful, awful.”

Throughout her summer breaks during high school and college, Darci worked as a lifeguard at the Lewistown City Swimming Pool. As part of her training she’d been required to pass annual lifesaving and CPR classes – skills she’d maintained throughout her career as a teacher.

Laying the unconscious Kaden on the stream bank, Darci began to administer CPR. On the telephone with her father, an emergency dispatcher suggested the Gillens load the little boy into their family vehicle and meet the ambulance racing toward them on the highway. Darci continued to work on Kaden.

As Darci ran to the running automobile, two young women came running into the Gillen cabin area. One of them was Jessica Newton, the little boy’s panicked mother.

“Oh, thank God,” Jennifer Newton shouted – but young Kaden was still in crisis. Without question, the four adults and Kaden piled into the car and raced toward Lewistown.

“At that point he still didn’t have a heartbeat or breathing,” Darci said. “Not too far into the drive we got his heartbeat going. We just kept breathing for him, and then I thought I heard him make a gasp. Pretty soon he started to take breaths, but he was not conscious at all.”

At the edge of the Denton cutoff, where Highway 191 intersects with Highway 81, the Gillens’ car met up with a Lewistown ambulance crew. The transfer of Kaden took only seconds, leaving Darci and her father standing on the side of the highway wondering what had just happened.

Father and daughter returned to their family cabin, and for nearly a day had no idea whether the baby they’d tried to save had lived or died.

“That first night, as I was laying there in bed wondering where in the world this baby was and whatever had happened to him, I kept thinking – I just kept praying,” Darci said. “That whole night I didn’t know. We didn’t know for a whole day if he made it or what happened.”

The next afternoon, Kaden Sluggett’s great-grandmother walked over to the Gillen cabin, gave Darci a big hug, thanked them all and told them the good news. Kaden Sluggett had made it to Lewistown, and was then life-flighted to St. Vincent Healthcare in Billings. The little boy was still unconscious, but all signs suggested he would make a full recovery.

For her actions in saving Kaden Sluggett’s life, the Fergus County Sheriff’s Office has recognized Darci with a Life Saving Award. Fergus County Sheriff Troy Eades said it is the first time in his 17 years with the sheriff’s department that such an award has been presented to a civilian.

“There aren’t a lot of people out there who can pull a small child out from a creek and recognize that he needs CPR, then step right up and start doing it,” Eades said.

However, in the days that followed the incident, Darci continued to have trouble sleeping. She thought about all the unfathomable things, about how she had been there at the right time, at the right moment and how with just a few small differences it all could have turned out so much worse.

“I wasn’t actually supposed to get to Montana until Tuesday,” she said reflecting back on that afternoon, “but my kids and I decided to come early randomly. My brother was supposed to be there any minute, but he had trailer problems and had to pull over and stop. Had he been there at that time we would have all been way away from the water.”

“I don’t even know why I happened to glance over,” Darci added. “No one called my name. It was as if somebody had tapped me and said, ‘Look over your shoulder.’ If I had just looked probably even 10 seconds later, he would have been too far gone for me to even know what it was floating by. It was a miracle – it was a miracle I was even able to see him.”

A few days after the rescue, Darci went to the hospital in Billings to see Kaden. She made the trip with a bit of reluctance, but was reassured by an old friend who works as a counselor.

“I called her and I just said, ‘I’m traumatized I think. I’m trying not to be but I think I am, and I have this opportunity to go down to Billings and see this baby. Do you think it would be weird? Do you think I should do it?”

She said, "I absolutely think you should do it. Not for the baby, and not for the family but for you. It’s so you can play a different reel of pictures going through your mind.”

“The family was so lovely and thankful and kind,” Darci said of her visit to St. Vincent’s hospital. “They wanted to take pictures, but Kaden was just glaring at me like – ‘Don’t you think I’m going to get away from my mom and let you hold me.’”

This past weekend, Kaden and his family came to visit Darci and the Gillens at their cabin on Warm Spring Creek. There the little boy she had saved laughed and played, and was very much the precocious child he had always been.

“It was so good to see him,” Darci said. “I saw him walking and laughing and playing peek-a-boo with my husband.”

Darci paused for a moment, sucking in the emotion that threatened to overcome her.

“I told my mom that July 9 will always be Kaden’s gotcha day for me, because it was the day I gotcha. I hope that as the years go on I can stay in touch, and see him as he grows up.”