Jacksonville lawyer saves toddler from drowning.

A muddy dog, a spontaneous stop to window shop for new cars, and a quick-thinking lawyer converged to save a 2-year-old boy from drowning.

As 36-year-old Patrick Michael Leahy, Jr., a Jacksonville lawyer specializing in maritime law, tells the story, he was pulling into his driveway, returning home from a soccer game with his two boys, ages 7 and 5.

Just then, his neighbor ran over to say she was upset that her toddler son had been missing for about 10 minutes.

The frantic mother said a neighborhood dog had come to play with the children in the cul-de-sac, and she had stepped into her home for just a moment to ask her husband who owned the dog.

The next thing she knew, both her son and the dog were missing. And her husband was driving the car through the neighborhood on a desperate search.

Leahy jogged behind the houses, looking in the wooded areas, calling the boy's name. Without any luck, he returned to the front of his house, feeling worthless. So he jumped on his bike to continue the search.

Just then, Leahy saw the dog, all wet and muddy.

"It was perfect timing that I happened to go by and see the dog out of the corner of my eye. I was upset at what that may mean, so I jumped off my bike and ran to a pond, about 70 yards by 20 yards."

There in the middle of the still water of the pond, the boy floated.

"What ran through my mind was 'No!' I sprinted into the water and swam out to get him and pulled him out to land. Lie was not breathing and his lips were blue."

Leahy summoned up his CPR training he had learned 15 years earlier when he was a deck officer in the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. Though he had only practiced on mannequins and had never used the training since, lie remembered how to give the boy a couple of CPR-style breaths and tried to push the water out of his lungs. He ran to the back door of the closest house and beat on the door. He ran back and turned the boy over and pushed on his back, did a couple more breaths, and sprinted to the front door of the next house, carrying the boy, where the neighbors called 911.

He could tell there was water in the boy's chest and he flipped him over, thinking gravity would help, as he gave more pushes to his lungs.

"Just about then, the boy's father was driving back by the neighborhood and saw me out front with his son. I can only imagine what was going through his mind," Leahy recalled.

"Is he breathing?" the father asked.

"Not yet," Leahy answered, pushing on the boy's back.

Finally...