Young boy suffers gruesome injury while sneaking into neighborhood pool

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    Antioch, CA (KPIX) — A young boy suffered a gruesome leg injury late Saturday afternoon when he slipped while climbing a spiked wrought iron fence surrounding the pool at Antioch’s Deer Valley High swimming pool.

Officials said the boy’s leg was impaled on the fence and Contra Costa Fire crews and Antioch police officers were forced to carefully extricate him from the fence.

“This was a difficult extrication,” Contra Costa County Battallion Chief Jim Huntze told KPIX 5. “He was elevated off the ground about 10 feet. He had the impaled fence go through his leg…We had to support his weight.”

The rescue crews had to jerry-rig a large sling and then carefully remove the 12-year-old boy. They were forced to leave a portion of the fence in the leg and the boy was airlifted to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland.

“We had to use cutting saws to cut the bar away,” Huntze said.

Health orders shutting down local public pools during the current COVID-19 pandemic set the scene for the accident. Because of the order, the large wrought iron fence surrounding the pool has remained locked.

But Huntze said that hasn’t prevented youngsters from climbing the fence to swim in the pool.

“Most of the pools in the county are shutdown,” he said. “So apparently kids have been coming over to the high school and climbing the fence to swim in the pool.”

An update on the young boy’s condition was not immediately available.

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