'Help me. I'm gonna die.' McCandless woman mourns granddaughter's death after asthma attack

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 deck and larger diameter wheels than a street skateboard.

She used the new longboard religiously, her grandmother said.

She was fiercely her own person, Reeg said.

Kevin Reeg, Kylee’s grandfather and Karey’s ex-husband, called Kylee “more a tom-boy than into make-up.”

“And she wanted nothing to do with pink,” he laughed.

Kylee recently applied for Allegheny County Camp Cadet, a weeklong program teaching area kids about law enforcement.

During a May 9 Camp Cadet interview in Monroeville, Kylee was told to “dress for success,” Reeg and camp officials said. Kylee eschewed dresses; she wanted to wear ripped jeans. The compromise: sweatpants.

Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Melinda Bondarenka, who helps organize the program, said acceptance letters don’t go out until June. Kylee never got the good news that she had made the cut.

“Kylee would have received an acceptance letter to attend camp,” Bondarenka said Thursday.

Kylee started playing xylophone in her school band a few years after moving from Shaler to McCandless before first grade. She continued her percussion role into middle school.

For a kid with asthma, Kylee kept active, family members said. She did not use daily maintenance medications to help with breathing.

In addition to skateboarding, Kylee danced, from tap and ballet to hip-hop and jazz.

No response

It wasn’t that out of the ordinary for Kylee’s asthma to flare up when she was sick, or for her to need breathing treatments.

As a result, Reeg said, she didn’t immediately call 911 when Kylee started having breathing trouble.

When things turned dire, Reeg said, everything happened quickly.

Reeg said that after Kylee collapsed, she called 911 and frantically started CPR.

No response.

Within minutes, two advanced life-support ambulances and an EMS physician from the McCandless-Franklin Park Ambulance Authority were on scene, according to the organization.

They found Kylee unresponsive and took over CPR.

Again, no response.

Kylee was taken by ambulance to UPMC Passavant hospital in McCandless.

Doctors pronounced Kylee dead Monday at 12:37 a.m., according to the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office.

No cause or manner of death has been determined, the medical examiner said. The office declined further comment Thursday.

Allegheny County Police are not investigating Kylee’s death, a spokesman told TribLive.

McCandless police did not respond to emails or calls seeking comment.

‘It hit her hard’

Kylee’s real love was the outdoors. When still in diapers, Kylee often danced in the rain and liked jumping between puddles. She later excelled in gymnastics.

“She had to be outside — it was in her blood,” Reeg said.

Skateboarding, even just up and down her block, was a big part of that, family members told TribLive. Though indoors, gymnastics was Kylee’s “thing” during elementary school.

Kevin Reeg remembers watching his granddaughter compete on the balance beam or in floor exercises at Jewart’s Gymnastics in Hampton.

Despite on-and-off battles with asthma, it wasn’t uncommon for Kylee to net a 9 or 9.5 score out of 10 during gymnastics competitions.

“She was very good at everything she did in gymnastics,” said Kevin Reeg, 64, of Hampton.

Asthma “didn’t really affect her that often,” he said. “But, when it did hit her, it hit her hard.”

On Thursday he recalled the joy Kylee brought to others.

“She was always very happy, a very playful little girl,” he said. “I’m just kind of a wreck now. I can’t even believe it.”

Kylee also fought for the life she led, family members said.

Her biological parents weren’t in the picture from a young age, Reeg said. Her baby brother died. After Allegheny County’s Office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF) got involved with the family, Kylee’s older sister, Khloe, now 14, was taken in by other family members.

Kylee’s grandmother remembers the day she went to court to make her adoption of the toddler official. It was July 21, 2015. Kylee was 3. Reeg calls it one of the happiest days of her life.

“She had a horrible start,” Reeg told TribLive. “But she was just a beautiful, beautiful soul — and one of the happiest kids I’ve known. She was always singing, always happy.”

Officials from the North Allegheny school district, which includes Carson Middle School where Kylee attended, didn’t respond this week to multiple requests for comment.

In an email to families in the school district, Superintendent Brendan Hyland said counselors and psychologists would be made available to middle school students and staff.

‘Rare’ occurrence

Nearly 25 million Americans, more than 4.6 million of them children, had asthma in 2021, according to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Two out of every five those individuals suffered from asthma attacks that year.

More than 3,500 people in the U.S. died from asthma-related conditions in 2021, the CDC reported.

Just 51 of them were in the 12-17 age bracket like Kylee.

“It can happen, but it’s rare,” Dr. Russell Traister, an allergist and immunologist at West Penn Hospital in Bloomfield told TribLive on Thursday.

Traister regularly treats asthma patients who are Kylee’s age at West Penn, where he works in the pediatric unit. It’s a fairly large population of kids, he said.

Traister told TribLive the most important thing to do with kids who have breathing issues is to control symptoms.

He uses a “Rule of Two.” If you’re using a rescue inhaler more than two times a week or you’re waking from sleep with a cough or breathing problems two times a month, “that tells me your asthma is not being controlled,” he said.

If a child requires a rescue inhaler — like albuterol, a generic form of the medication Reeg said Kylee used on Sunday — more than once every four hours, they immediately should seek help, Traister said.

Can’t go back

Kylee’s family pet — a 130-pound Rottweiler named Detour — adored the girl. At 3:20 p.m. every school day, he’d nudge Reeg to go outside so he could meet Kylee at their front-yard gate.

On Sunday night, as Reeg, a former nursing student, performed CPR on Kylee, the dog barked and barked. He might have thought Reeg was hurting the girl, she said.

Reeg is inviting visitors to mourn with her on Saturday at Neely Funeral Home in Shaler. The family plans to gather at 2 p.m. A service starts at 7:30 p.m.

The funeral is not an end to Kylee’s story, Reeg said. She donated Kylee’s organs after working with Center for Organ Recovery & Education, a nonprofit based in O’Hara.

Reeg said the group might have a possible match to receive Kylee’s corneas. The center could not be reached for comment.

Reeg, who suffered a stroke several years ago and is disabled, is staying temporarily with family.

She feels she can’t return to the house where Kylee died.

“We had this thing, where I’d say to her all the time, ‘What’s my job?’” Reeg said. “She’d say, ‘Keeping me safe!’ And I’d go, ‘Am I doing my job?” ‘Yep!’ she’d say. It was my job to keep her safe.”

“My baby girl died right there on the floor,” said Reeg, weeping to the point she barely could speak. “I just can’t go back there.”