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A day on a South Carolina beach ended with a Greensboro firefighter using his training to save the life of a child who had already turned blue by the time anyone knew she was choking.

Dustin Jones was at Cherry Grove Beach on Saturday afternoon playing in the water with his 3-year-old daughter when he heard a call for help coming from shore. The 28-year-old ran toward the voice, with his wife, Rachel, a former intensive care unit nurse, behind him.

He found the year-old child there — limp, lifeless, with her lips already turning blue.

“The mom was saying, 'Please save my baby, she’s choking,’” Jones said.

The child had been in a play pen under a beach umbrella, but nobody knew how long it had been since she had stopped breathing.

Jones grabbed the child, flipped her over and gave her a few blows to the back. He then turned her back over and performed chest compressions.

“You could see her eyes rolling back in her head,” said Ashley Hamilton of Gibsonville, who happened to be at the same stretch of beach with her family and dialed 911. “I’m still getting chills.”

Jennifer Martin was among four Lexington nurses on a weekend getaway who got to the baby about the same time as Jones. One of the other nurses also called 911.

“We didn’t know if she was going to make it,” said Martin, who watched Jones work on the child for 10 minutes. “We thought she could have been dead.”

Once the child started taking short breaths, Jones got on the back of a beach patrol truck with the girl’s parents to get her to the street entrance. There, EMS workers put her on oxygen.

“The child was breathing, and the child was actually crying when they transferred the child to the ambulance,” said Fire Chief Tom Barstow of the North Myrtle Beach Public Safety Department. He had read the written report provided by the beach patrol supervisor responding to the 911 call. Neither the child nor her parents were identified because the child recovered, Barstow said.

Barstow says he plans to send Greensboro’s fire chief a “Challenge Coin” to pass on to Jones for his actions. The medal has rarely gone to someone outside the department, Barstow said. Jones, who spent five years in the Navy before joining the Greensboro Fire Department in 2007, is a graduate of Northeast Guilford High School.

“From the narrative that I’ve heard from the beach supervisor, it appears as though this firefighter did save this child’s life,” Barstow said.

Jones, who also has a 4-month-old son, had been on the beach for a second day of a family vacation when the accident occurred. As he walked back to his own kids that Saturday afternoon, he was just hoping the child would be OK.

The next day, the mother, who told him they were from High Point, came down to the beach to find him. The woman said her daughter had been released from the hospital and was doing well.

But Jones doesn’t think he’s the hero the mother and people on the beach are making him out to be.

“I told her I didn’t do anything special, I just happened to be at the right place at the right time and just did what anyone else would have done,” Jones said.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com