A Vancouver student who watched his friend die of cardiac arrest says he can’t understand why the school district won’t let him donate a medical device that could save others in the same situation.

The tragedy, first reported by Postmedia, happened during a basketball tryout at Point Grey Secondary in 2022.

Tobias Zhang told Global News his friend left the gym to get water and never came back. He didn’t think anything of it until another student came running in to say someone had collapsed at the water fountain.

“I saw the body of my friend just lying on the ground. He was making this noise,” he said.

“His skin was turning really purple.”

Efforts by the coach and paramedics to resuscitate were unable to save the student.

But what happened next shocked Zhang.

“After his death I looked into cardiac arrest in general, and I found out there is this machine called an AED that can help — up to a 75-per cent chance — to resuscitate someone after they have a cardiac arrest,” he said.

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“Every single public place was mandated to have it, but I found out our school does not have an AED, and there was no policy about AEDs in our school.”

After speaking with his principal, Zhang learned the Vancouver School Board had not installed AEDs in schools and wouldn’t accept donated devices.

The district, he alleged, was concerned about installation and maintenance costs, didn’t want individual schools to get them before others, and believed there was a low risk of cardiac events among students.

“My friend died. I think that answers the risk is too low thing,” Zhang said.

In a statement, the Vancouver School Board said it has been “actively working” on a plant to deploy AEDs in high schools.

“As that work progresses, we adhere to the guidance provided by the Provincial Health Officer and the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and have AEDs in select schools to support students with specific health needs, according to individual students’ emergency plans (developed under a physician’s direction). This practice has been in place for many years,” the district said.

The district said that currently there were fewer than 10 students who met that criteria and that their schools had staff who were specially trained to use the devices.

But Vancouver School Trustee Jennifer Reddy said she’s open to the idea.

“It’s long overdue,” she said.

“There’s incidents that could have been prevented. So this year’s budget process is an opportunity to put AEDs as a line item.”

Lower Mainland emergency room physician Kevin Shi told Global News that AEDs are easy to use, and even provides instruction in real time to anyone trying to operate them.

“I have even trained my own child who is nine to use one,” he said.

Shi said he believes the devices should be available in all major public places and believes everyone should be trained on how to use them and how to perform CPR.

AEDs, he said, can often be the difference between life and death.

“The faster you restore cardiac function, restore the heart to beating normally, the better chance for survival,” he said.

Zhang, meanwhile, isn’t giving up.

He and a group of students are fundraising to purchase an AED and continue to push the district to allow them to install it.

He said they plan to keep fundraising to buy more of the devices.

“It’s ridiculous that this requires students to petition and to fundraise. This is a life-saving device that should be mandatory in every place, and it is mandatory in every place, except in these schools for whatever reason.”