Pitch hits boy's heart

BOILING SPRINGS, N.C. -- A 12-year-old boy was playing baseball one minute and clinically dead the next. Many are saying it's a miracle he survived.

Dustin Jones was up at bat at a little league baseball game in Boiling Springs on Tuesday Night when the pitch y hit him.

“It hit me and I was going to go to first,” he said.

“He dropped his bat. He went to first base. Halfway to first base he just fell down,” said Donny Hastings, Jones' coach.

The ball hit the seventh grader in just the right spot, at just the right moment -- stopping his heart.

“I remember getting hit. I started running, then everything went black,” Jones said.

Paramedic Alan Wacaster happened to be watching the game because his son had played in one just before. He saw Jones go down and ran to the field.

Wacaster says the boy,

“He was pulseless and not breathing," Wacaster. "Medically speaking he would be considered clinically dead.”

He started CPR.

“He opened his eyes, began to tell us, 'I'm fine. I'm not hurt. What happened?'” Wacaster said.

That's all the 12-year-old remembers.

Doctors said incidents like that have only happened 182 times, and only 15 percent have survived, half with brain damage.

“I was lucky,” Jones said.

“There’s really no way to explain it other than we were all there for a purpose," Wacaster said.

The coach thinks,

“He's a miracle," Hastings said. "One of God's children. He’s a miracle.”