HARRIS COUNTY, Tx. — A 9-year-old boy is being hailed as a hero after a freak accident became a near-death experience on the playground.
10-year-old Nik Bock now has a neck brace after trying to go down a slide at his elementary school.
Nik says he was pretending to fish near the top when he: "threw the jump rope in the air like if you were on a roller coaster, you throw your hands up. I was like that, then the wind caught the jump rope, made it go around my neck. And there's little holes on it with the steps, and the handle got caught in one of them, which made me get hanged."
The fourth grader says that all of sudden, he was hanging down the slide and losing consciousness. "I felt tingling," says Nik, "And then a few seconds later my eyes started to close, but then I was able to open one eye a little bit. Whenever he got the jump rope off, both my eyes opened wide. And at that point, it was a little hard to breathe and I had a whole bunch of tingling."
Fortunately, 9-year-old Raul Izaguirre was just feet away on the playground.
"He went down the slide," says Raul. "That's when I saw it that he was choking. And that's when I went up the ladder and pulled it out the hole."
Raul didn't race over to a teacher, he acted on the spot, which likely saved Nik's life.
Nik is expected to make a full recovery.