Kylee Marie Reiber knew something was wrong. The McCandless sixth-grader had struggled to manage asthma her whole life, family members said. Suffering from a cold on Sunday at her Wittmer Road home, Kylee took two breathing treatments — inhaling the asthma medication Ventolin each time through a nebulizer mask, said her grandmother, Karey Reeg.
It wasn’t helping. “It still hurts,” Kylee, 12, told her grandmother, “my chest hurts.” Reeg put a pulse oximeter, a small electronic device that measures oxygen levels in the blood, on Kylee’s finger.
The National Institutes of Health says a typical oxygen range registers between 94 and 100. Kylee’s read 64, Reeg said. They needed to rush to the hospital.
But Kylee couldn’t catch her breath. Reeg said that Kylee knelt down and then spoke. “Grandma, please,” Kylee said.
“Help me. I’m gonna die.” “Then,” Reeg told TribLive, weeping, “she fell backwards and she did.
” Fiercely independent Kylee, first and foremost, was a skateboarder. “She’d get off the school bus, and she’d drop her board and she just went,” said Reeg, 57, of McCandless, who raised Kylee alone and adopted her nine years ago. “The boys would go, ‘Oh.
My. God,’” Reeg said. “And she loved that attention.
She loved that she skated in a way they couldn’t...
She was not afraid of anything.” Kylee’s family fueled her obsession, buying her for Christmas a new, turquoise longboard — a type of skateboard with a longer d.