Parent saves Mansfield ISD student's life after she collapses from heart condition on basketball court

A Mansfield ISD middle-schooler collapsed and stopped breathing during a basketball game due to an undiscovered heart condition, only surviving because a parent jumped in to perform CPR and saved her life.

14-year-old Cirye Carpenter, nicknamed Cici, now needs open-heart surgery but is grateful for the heroic actions of the woman she now calls her second mother.

Sports have always been the most prominent part of Carpenter’s life, and even her goal for the future.

“To play softball in high school and college,” said Carpenter.

In November, Carpenter was playing on Mansfield ISD’s Jobe Middle School basketball team when she started feeling off. Carpenter collapsed on the sideline.

“I was really, really dizzy, and I just felt like really nauseous,” Carpenter said. “And it kind of felt like I wasn’t, you know, there.”

Kari McConnell was leaving the gym with her daughter, another Jobe middle-schooler.

“And I heard someone say they got the AED out,” McConnell told NBC5. “The nurse in me, I’m in my 20th year of nursing, so the nurse in me, I’m like, I’m going to go make sure everything’s fine.”

McConnell tested Carpenter’s pulse with the school’s defibrillator, a tool that can shock a stopped heart back into rhythm.

“But the heart rate and rhythm was fine not to shock, and she was talking to me,” McConnell said.

Carpenter was hospitalized that day, but doctors didn’t find anything wrong and released her. Two weeks later, she was playing in another basketball game, and McConnell was once again outside the gym with her daughter.

“We walk through that back hall to leave, and I hear ‘McConnell!’ being yelled from across the gym,” McConnell said.

She rushed inside and found Carpenter in much worse condition than last time.

“When I got her down on the ground, I could not feel a pulse at all in her wrist,” McConnell said. “Her face is slowly getting grayer and grayer to where I know she’s not breathing.”

Watching the nurse call for the defibrillator, Carpenter’s mother feared the worst.

“When I noticed that she wasn’t breathing, I thought she was gone,” Shay McConnell told NBC5. “I really thought she was gone.”

“Because she wasn’t responding, she wasn’t moving, her lips and her hands were blue,” the mother contined.

McConnell had never performed CPR by herself before. But she said she felt called by God to take action.

“I got up on my knees and I went to start doing a first compression, and Cici took a huge gasp of breath,” McConnell said.

Cici was alive. She was rushed to the hospital, where this time cardiologists found something: an anomalous aortic origin of the left coronary artery, a life-threatening heart defect that she’d had since birth and never knew about.

“I was absolutely heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken,” Shay Carpenter said. “Because I immediately thought it’s my fault, she was born with this and we never knew.”

Carpenter has to have open heart surgery next week to fix the condition, hopefully allowing her to play sports again one day.

Going to the hospital with the family that day will be Kari McConnell, the woman who kept Carpenter’s heart beating.

“If I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, Cici could have not survived,” McConnell said.

“I can call her kind of like my second mom, you know, she’s really done a lot for me,” Cirye Carpenter said. “And I can’t thank her enough.”

These days both Carpenter and McConnell become emotional whenever they see each other, their two families linked forever by an act of heroism.

“Because one second longer, just one second and my baby wouldn’t be here,” said Shay Carpenter.

A GoFundMe has been launched to help the Carpenter family with medical bills associated with Cici’s condition. You can find it here.