California youth football cheerleader collapses at practice, suffers fatal injury
A 10-year-old cheerleader for the Waterford Sabercats youth football team collapsed during a Monday practice at Waterford High School and has sustained a fatal injury.
The girl is a fifth-grader at Waterford’s Lucille Whitehead Intermediate School. Waterford Unified School District Superintendent Jose Aldaco said Tuesday the practice was not part of a high school event.
The girl’s mother, Tiana Lamunyon, posted Wednesday morning on Facebook that her daughter, Nevaeh, has no brain activity. Lamunyon wrote on a GoFundMe page that her daughter had a brain aneurysm.
Lamunyon said she and her husband will donate their daughter’s organs once she is considered legally dead because they believe that is what Nevaeh would have wanted.
“Thank you guys for the prayers,” Lamunyon wrote. “Please pray for Nevaeh’s recipients whoever they may be.”
Aldaco said Tuesday this is a heartbreaking event for a small town like Waterford and its school district, which has 1,827 students. The intermediate school has 370 children. The city has about 9,000 residents.
“Waterford is a small community, and everyone knows each other,” he said. “... Families are tight.”
One effort to help the Lamunyon family is a page set up at takethemameal.com, named “Meals for Tiana and Levi Lamunyon.”
Aldaco said the intermediate school has a part-time mental health clinician and a part-time counselor. One was scheduled to work Tuesday but both were called in to help students. The district also brought in two of its counselors assigned to the high school.
“My understanding,” Aldaco said, “is there was a lot of sadness.” He said he expected that to grow in the coming days as the children learn more.
Aldaco said the district is working with Community Hospice, Family Concern Counseling and Sierra Vista Child & Family Services to have more counselors brought in this week to help students as well as staff. He added the district’s other schools can provide counselors and mental health clinicians as needed.
Aldaco said he was at the district office when the fifth-grader collapsed. He received a phone call about 6:15 p.m and he went to the practice. He said the adults with the cheerleading team were giving aid, including CPR, to the girl.
The Modesto Fire Department reported in its daily incident summary for Monday that firefighters were dispatched for an emergency medical services call at the high school at 6:27 p.m.
The summary said someone was performing CPR on the girl on the grass outside the gym when firefighters arrived. The girl was quickly loaded onto an ambulance and taken to the hospital, the report said.
Lamunyon wrote on GoFundMe that the loss of her daughter comes as she has an infant at home and is pregnant.
“... We are asking for just a little help to get us through the next few months of not working. Anything and everything will help us keep our house afloat.”
