'My Baby's Not Breathing:' NYPD Officers Save 8-Day-Old Boy In The Bronx
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Two NYPD officers were in the right place at the right time when a newborn baby needed CPR in the Bronx.
Baby Ray sure gave his mother and two NYPD officers a scare last week. At just eight days old, he started choking on milk in an apartment off Crotona Avenue.
"She was desperate. She felt like her son was going to die," the boy's mom said through a translator.
The new mother said after she burped her baby and put him on the coach, he started spitting up and was turning blue. She ran outside, saw a police car parked on the corner and frantically knocked on the window.
"She was like, 'help me, please. My baby's not breathing, he's blue, he's choking,'" said Officer Elizabeth Velasquez.
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They ran upstairs where the newborn was unconscious.
"I started giving him blows in the back... Then, I turned the baby over and started giving him chest compressions with my two fingers," Velasquez said.
But he wasn't waking up.
"We made a decision as a team to take the baby ourselves to the hospital in the police car," said Officer Daniel Wynohradnyk.
Velasquez continued CPR for the entire car ride to the hospital.
"It was hard. He was so tiny and I was very gentle, because he just felt so fragile," she said.
"You have no sense of time, you know. I'm sure it was quick, it felt like forever," said Wynohradnyk.
Once they heard the baby cry, time started moving again.
"The best feeling I've ever had as a cop of 20 years. That was the best feeling I've ever had on the job," Velasquez said.
Bauman asked the mother, who only speaks Spanish, what she said to the officers once she knew her baby was going to be OK.
"Oh my god," she said. "If we weren't there, she doesn't know what would happen with the baby."
Now, Ray can sleep even more soundly with two NYPD officers watching over him.
