An officer in Texas rescued a toddler who was choking and unresponsive. On July 22, Officer Scott Barrett responded to a call during his overnight shift from a panicked mother whose child was not breathing. While police respond to medical emergencies frequently, they often do so as secondary or backup units to EMS. Fortunately, the officer remained calm and sprung into action.
Officer rescues unconscious toddler from choking
On Tuesday at around 12:50 a.m., Officer Barrett was the first to arrive on scene in response to a 23-month-old child named Paisley who was choking and had stopped breathing, according to a post from the Southmayd Police Department on its official Facebook page.
Bodycam footage of the incident shows the officer stopping his vehicle at the residence and sprinting over to the mother, who was carrying her daughter in her arms.
When asked if the child was still choking, the mother in distress yelled, “Yes, I can’t get it out!”
Sherry Steward, the child’s grandmother, told KXII she knew something was wrong immediately when Paisley couldn’t breathe. “It’s like she’s convulsing, so I run and get her and she’s solid purple and I realized she’s choking,” she recalled. “Blood was coming out of her mouth. Blood was coming out of her nose. She was just non-responsive.”
With Paisley in his arms and EMS not yet on the scene, Barrett knew he couldn’t perform a standard Heimlich maneuver on the toddler since that would apply too much force on her abdomen. But he stayed calm and remembered his training and began patting the girl’s back forcefully.
“We’re taught to tilt the child over and to just do back blows, firmly,” he recounted, “and that’s what I did.”
After several blows, Paisley stirred back to life and began to breathe. The child was later taken to the hospital after EMS arrived, with Barrett deciding to stay at the hospital until the child was released.
“Although I’ve had to handle incidents with small children and stuff,” Barrett said, ” “I’ve never had one that was lifeless like that.”
Steward said that the officer visited the family the following day and that Paisley “was out running around like nothing even ever happened.”
During the visit, the child showed her gratitude in her own way and “put her head on him like she knew that he saved her.”
