Bigfork pastor saves dog from drowning

KALISPELL (AP) — A Bigfork pastor recuperating from a torn Achilles tendon was in the right place at the right time last Monday to resuscitate and save the life of a Boston terrier named Dozer.

Randy Passons, the associate pastor at Crossroads Christian Fellowship, was lounging on the dock at Yenne Point on Flathead Lake near Woods Bay while his 7-year-old daughter, Avery, and other neighborhood children swam during the heat of a near 100-degree day.

Passons, still using a walking boot and crutches from recent surgery on his Achilles tendon, had removed the boot to dangle his feet in the cold water. How he injured himself is another story that involved what he called "full contact preaching" during a Sunday sermon at Crossroads.

"I was running up and down the stage stairs, and when I hit the main level of the stage I heard it snap," he said. "I ended up finishing, hopping on one foot. The context (of the sermon) made it seem like part of the act. Most people didn't know what I'd done."

Passons knew the two siblings, Kyra Wilkerson and her younger brother Chase, who showed up at the dock with their dogs that hot afternoon, and he knew the tenacious Dozer, a Boston terrier who would try to retrieve a tree if someone were able to throw one, he said.

When Kyra, 16, threw an extremely large stick out for Dozer, the dog naturally went after it.

"It was nothing unusual for Dozer," Passons said. "But I noticed his back end sinking down. It's very clear water and you could see to the bottom. He took that stick underwater and started swimming on the bottom, and I'm thinking, he better let go of that stick. It was mildly concerning.

"That dog would hang on to a stick if it were attached to a jet plane," he continued. "I watched it carefully. He stopped swimming and started to roll."

Passons then saw the dog vomit under the water and become motionless on the lake bottom. Passons' first response was to jump in — on one foot — and retrieve the dog.

He heard Kyra calling her mother and hysterically screaming, "Dozer's dead. He drowned."

"It was easy to believe that Dozer was gone to chase sticks in the afterlife," Passons said. "He was emotionless, breathless; there was nothing there."

Passons had been trained as an emergency medical technician 20 years ago and had heard of people giving cardio-pulmonary resuscitation to animals.

"It can't hurt to try, I thought," he said. "So I did chest compressions, grabbed his face in both hands" to seal the sides of Dozer's wide mouth.

All around him children were screaming and crying.

It seemed like an eternity as Passons breathed into Dozer's mouth, again and again.

Then he heard it: "A mouse's breath, the faintest, tiniest little breath."

He poured some water on Dozer because of the extreme heat.

"His head came up. Thirty seconds later he jumped up, wanting to fetch a stick," Passons said. "It turned the worst day (for those kids) into the best day."

As his young daughter hugged him that night, she thanked him for saving Dozer's life, and his heart was full.

"Every dad wants to be a hero," he said. "It made my year."

Passons said he believes divine intervention was involved — that if he hadn't injured his foot he may not have taken the time that day to watch his daughter swim.

"If God needed (this torn tendon) to happen so I'd be there on that dock, I'd do it again," he said. "I'd spend another three months in a walking cast."

Kyra, a Columbia Falls student who is in Woods Bay for the summer to work at Woods Bay Grill, said she's calling Dozer her "miracle."

"He's my baby. I love that little dog," she said about her beloved Boston terrier. "He loves the water, and we're getting him a life jacket to wear from now on."

This wasn't Dozer's first scrape with death, Kyra confided. Apparently he's had a couple of close calls in his five years.

"I say he's the dog with nine lives," she said.