SUMMERFIELD, Fla. – A Marion County sheriff's deputy was wrong when he told neighbors to stop performing CPR on a teenager who had tried to commit suicide -- even though one of the neighbors claimed to have felt a faint pulse, an internal investigation found.
According to an internal affairs report obtained by Local 6, Deputy Gregory Spicher Jr. responded to a Summerfield home on the afternoon of November 14 after the teen's mother called 911 to report that she found her son hanging from a tree limb.
Next-door neighbor Jay Timson told Local 6 that he's a former paramedic, and he ran to help after he heard screaming.
He said he helped cut 14-year-old Anthony Ybarra from the tree and performed CPR on him as soon as he could.
He said one of Ybarra's family friends joined him in trying to restart the boy's heart.
According to the investigative report, when Spicher arrived at the home, he ordered Timson and the family friend to stop performing CPR and to walk away from the boy's body, even though one of them claimed they felt a faint pulse.
Timson said he thought it was odd that the deputy told them to stop as he had been taught not to stop performing CPR unless someone else takes over.
Spicher told investigators that he didn't feel a pulse, and he called paramedics on his radio to inform them that the case was now a "code 7," which meant the teen was dead.
"The only reason I stopped it for that 30 seconds to a minute was to check for a pulse," Spicher told investigators. "At that time, the medics were coming in. I didn't want everybody coming in because of crime scene preservation. When I lifted his shirt, I could see the pooling and the lividity in his back."
When paramedics arrived, they told investigators their equipment showed Ybarra did have a faint pulse, and they quickly transported him to the Villages Hospital, where he was transferred to Shands Medical Center in Gainesville.
Ybarra survived for eight days before his family decided to remove him from life support on November 22, according to the report.
"You think they're gone, and then they come back and say hey we found a pulse," said Jolene Waldron, Anthony's mother. "All of that oxygen he could've been getting in that few minutes could've helped."
The investigation concluded Spicher's order to stop performing CPR was a dereliction of duty but stopped short of blaming him for Ybarra's eventual death.
"The purpose of this investigation was not to make any determinations as to if Deputy Gregory Spicher's commands to civilians to cease CPR had any bearings on the life or death of Anthony Ybarra," the report reads.
Spicher was reassigned by the Sheriff's Office to the Marion County Jail, where he will work as a corrections officer.