SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO: A New Mexico officer is being hailed as a hero after his life-saving measures helped a breathless newborn recover. The incident occurred at around 10.45 pm local time on July 24 while Ismael Perez was on duty last month.
According to New Mexico State Police, he ‘received a frantic 911 call’ where a mother had given birth in a car while trying to reach the hospital. It was posted by the police department over Facebook with body camera footage from the incident. It showed Officer Perez reaching out to a desperate family.
How did Ismael Perez save a breathless baby?
The baby boy's umbilical cord was attached to its mother and he was not breathing, according to state police. Perez then took matters into his own hands, quite literally, and noticed that the umbilical cord was compressed.
He immediately started performing backslaps on the newborn until the baby finally cried. "I have three kids of my own, so I've seen the doctors do that with my daughters because they came out of the womb the same way and no crying or anything. So I did the same thing," Perez said.
"It was like a sense of relief, you know because I knew someone that knew what they were doing was helping. To me, in my eyes, he's a hero. He helped me in what I would say was one of the scariest moments in my life," said the newborn's father Miguel Covarrubias.
Perez told KOAT News, "I saw a car run the red light. So when I went to pull it over, I pulled into the hospital. I could hear they were mentioning something on the police radio about them needing an escort."
As he stepped out of his vehicle, the officer could make out something was not right. “I thought it was a toddler. From what I could hear on the radio, it sounded like a toddler. So in my mind at all, a toddler was choking on something," Perez said.
But it wasn't. Instead, it was a newborn baby lying in the passenger seat. He then saw a baby lying on the passenger seat not breathing. The father of the baby, Miguel Covarrubias, said, "When I woke up, my wife was like, I'm having contractions, can take me in? I was like yeah, for sure."
'I feel the back to the baby coming'
But while they rushed to the hospital in their car, the baby came out. "She's like, I feel back to the baby coming," Covarrubias said. "I was like, OK, hold on we're almost there. Just hold on. I was going a decent speed, you know."
It was that moment when Perez noticed the 24-year-old’s car jumping the red light and started tracking the vehicle."I didn't make a complete stop, but I stopped. And there was a New Mexico State police sitting there at the stop sign. So I stopped. But I didn't, then I took the right really quick," Covarrubias said.
"As soon as I opened the door, I see a newborn baby on the seat lying there motionless. It kind of threw me off for a slight second," Perez said.
