Windrift Manager Steps In, Saves Life

By RORY CARLIN
AVALON — When others panicked Rose Grone jumped into a role she could never have foreseen: lifesaver.
On July 23, the Rossiter family checked into the Windrift Hotel here in Avalon, things were about to take a turn for the worse at the surfside resort. Janette Rossiter, her husband, and daughter, Sandra, stood at the check-in desk ready for an evening in Avalon, but something was not right.
Janette collapsed on the desk. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head when her body became pale and lifeless she collapsed into her husband’s arms. A crowd of hotel guest and employees gathered around the scene and Rose jumped into action.
“I knew something had to be done,” Grone recalled of the incident. While she was last certified more than four years ago the hotel front desk manager performed CPR on the collapsed patron with the skill of a veteran lifesaver, a skill she hoped to never use.
Mrs. Rossiter was taken by ambulance to Cape Regional Medical Center in Court House where she was airlifted from to the University of Pennsylvania’s Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia.
The doctor at Presbyterian told Sandra, Janette’s daughter, she would have died; without the quick action of Rose her mother would not be alive today.
“I was in shock. It didn’t make me feel heroic,” Grone recalled. “When somebody is lying there and not breathing, you have to do something or they could die.”