Local Hero Throws First Pitch at Silver Knights Game

Nashua Silver Knights

As a Nashua native, Matt Pulomena has certainly caught a few baseball games at Holman Stadium before. Last night, however, something different brought the 24-year-old out to the historic ball park.

An unexpected twist of events Wednesday morning turned Pulomena from landscaper to local hero, when he saved a young boy from drowning. While on a job for Design Works Landscaping, he heard a mother’s screams coming from a nearby backyard.

He immediately ran to help and found the woman holding her 3 year-old son, Connor, over her shoulder after pulling him, unconscious, from the family swimming pool.

Pulomena hopped the fence into the Windham, N.H. backyard, took the child from his mother and put him on the ground.

“I checked for a pulse and there wasn’t a pulse,” he explained. “I put my ear down to his mouth and he wasn’t breathing so I just immediately started CPR. It was probably after 5 or 6 rounds of CPR that the water started gushing out of his mouth and nose, and then probably two more rounds of CPR after that, he gasped for his first breath of air.”

The Nashua Silver Knights honored Pulomena’s heroic efforts Thursday evening as he threw out the ceremonial first pitch before the team took on the Old Orchard Beach Raging Tide.

The Holman Stadium crowd cheered as he threw a strike over home plate and gave him a standing ovation, but Pulomena simply remained thankful that he was able to have been in the right place at the right time.

“It makes me feel good that I was there to be able to do something and that my services were needed,” Pulomena said. “But the attention I don’t really care about, what I care about is Connor’s health.”

Pulomena had gone through CPR training with the Belmont Fire Department after living there for two years while attending school.

“If it wasn’t for the [Belmont Fire Department] I’d just be another bystander not knowing what to do,” he said. “For them I was grateful enough to do what I did.”

Following the accident, the young boy was taken to Parkland Medical Center in Derry, N.H. and was later transferred to Elliot Hospital in Manchester.

“From what I heard from his grandmother and aunt today, it seems like he’s doing all right,” Pulomena said Thursday night. “We’ll wait for the next couple of days and see how it goes. We’ll see how Connor pulls out of this and hopefully he can go swimming again.”