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| Durham County Sheriff's Deputy David Earp speaks to reporters at headquarters in Durham, N.C. on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015. Earp pulled two young girls out of a pond Sunday night after their father allegedly tried to drown them and their brother. |
DURHAM, N.C.
(AP) -- A North Carolina sheriff's deputy says he heard wailing in the
darkness and plunged into an apartment complex's pond at night to rescue
two young girls who, police say, had been thrown there to drown by
their father.
Durham County Sheriff's Deputy
David Earp was off duty and says he rushed out with little more than his
department T-shirt, badge and flashlight after the apartment manager
called him at home around 9 p.m. Sunday to report some kind of trouble.
"I
heard something about children, that they might possibly be in
trouble," Earp said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.
"And after I was informed that there were kids involved, instinct took
over just to go out there and rescue them."
Earp,
who lives around the corner from the pond, spotted the girls in the
dark with his flashlight and saw a 5-year-old floating and crying. Her
3-year-old sister was fully submerged. Earp says he charged into water
about 5 feet deep and scooped them up, holding one in each arm.
He
took no notice of the girls' father, Alan Tysheen Eugene Lassiter, 29,
of Raleigh - the man who was later charged with trying to drown his
kids. In the heat of the moment, Earp was focused on just one thing:
trying to save the girls' lives.
Earp said
they were about 10 feet from the bank, which slopes sharply down to the
pond that stretches about the length of a football field. After pulling
the girls to land, Earp said he took the 5-year-old to a nearby gazebo
and asked the property manager and her son to watch over her.
"I knew she was terrified and I just took her off and didn't want her to be around her sister," Earp said.
The
5-year veteran of the sheriff's department said he and the arriving
officers from the Durham police department performed cardio-pulmonary
resuscitation on the 3-year-old for about 15 minutes until medical help
arrived.
Police said the younger girl was in critical condition Tuesday and the older girl in good condition.
According to authorities, Lassiter threw the girls into the pond surrounded by apartment buildings.
Lassiter
said so himself, during a 911 call Sunday night. Between
expletive-laden rage and distraught sobs, he told a dispatcher that
officials had tried to take away his children as he dealt with a
personal problem. He can be heard on the call telling the complex's
property manager, "I just drowned my two daughters in the lake back
there."
Sylvia Scott, the property manager for
five years, said she called Earp after a tenant reported a man walking
around the complex looking for a son he said had been kidnapped. Scott
quickly found Lassiter talking on the phone with the 911 dispatcher.
Lassiter also told Scott his missing son had been kidnapped. In fact,
the boy had run away from his father and was seeking help, police said.
Earp,
who frequently drives through the complex in his marked patrol car,
arrived seconds later. As the deputy retrieved the girls, Lassiter was
standing nearby smoking a cigarette, then became distraught, saying
"what have I done?" and started crying, Scott said.
Lassiter did not live at the apartment complex, and Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez said he apparently went there at random.
Lassiter,
who waited passively by the pond as police arrived, was charged with
three counts of attempted murder: one count for each of the girls and a
third for their 7-year-old brother. Lassiter was jailed, with bond set
at $2 million, pending a hearing next month.
Earp, 26, who has no children of his own, says the life-or-death episode continues to reverberate for him.
"It plays over in my mind a lot, as I'm sure with any person," Earp said. "Hopefully these kids will push through."
He
added, "When it was all going on, I had tunnel vision. But later on, I
felt like if I didn't show up and find out where they were, they
possibly could have stayed in the water for several more minutes ... I
felt like I did one of the best things I could."
