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HOLLYWOOD

Hollywood Hills High players, coach to be honored for heroic rescue

Football players who helped rescue a family will be honored by the School Board and the city of Hollywood.

pmazzei@MiamiHerald.com

The Broward School Board will recognize four Hollywood Hills High School football players and their coach Tuesday for helping rescue a Flagler Beach family from a car crash outside Clewiston in July.

Coach Scott Barnwell was driving Alvin Arnold, Jared Maldonado, Clarence Murphy and Anthony Yerou from a prep football competition in Tampa on a rainy night July 12 when they saw a man waving from the side of the road. A Nissan SUV was overturned and sinking in a canal along U.S. 27.

Trapped inside were James Bryan, his wife and their 2-year-old granddaughter, strapped in her car seat.

The players, the man who flagged them down and Barnwell, a former Miami-Dade police officer and kicker for the University of Miami Hurricanes, yanked a van door off its hinges and got the toddler out of the car, where the water was four feet deep and rising. They also pulled out Bryan, 56.

Another passerby cut a seat belt to save Juanita Carrillo Bryan, 53, who was under water and not breathing.

Jared, a junior lineman, performed CPR -- a skill he learned in school as a ninth-grader -- and revived her. She was airlifted to Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers, where she later died. Her husband and granddaughter survived.

The School Board resolution will honor the players and coach ``who, over the course of one hour, turned from athletes to heroes.''

``This rescue had nothing to do with football, but had everything to do with what the team had learned about each other while playing and practicing together -- quick thinking, strategy and teamwork,'' the resolution says.

The city of Hollywood will also recognize the players and coach with an Award of Valor on Wednesday.

In other business, board members will also sign off on rehiring 54 teachers who were laid off early in the summer.

That brings the number of rehired teachers to 280 of the nearly 400 who received pink slips in June.

Sixty-eight teachers remain to be placed; the others have parted ways with the district.

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