MIDDLETOWN, Ohio -- Two Middletown police officers broke with procedure Saturday night to save a 4-year-old boy’s life.
Officer Evan Mosley arrived at the scene of a panicking father’s 911 call alone; most of the city’s other first responders were tied up at a structure fire across town. According to the call, the boy had stopped breathing in the bathtub inside his family’s Yankee Road home.
“He had a faint pulse and was breathing shallow,” Mosley said. “You could tell the child was in bad shape.”
Five minutes of CPRR, with the boy’s father growing increasingly anxious beside Mosley, failed to revive him. So did the chest compression delivered by Officer Connor Kirby, who arrived shortly after Mosley to assist.
Both officers knew the boy would have to go to a hospital, but the nearest ambulance was 15 minutes away in Franklin, Ohio. The pair made a split-second decision.
“No matter how fast that medic was going to come, I knew we couldn’t wait anymore,” Mosley said.
He drove the boy to the Atrium Medical Center while Kirby continued to perform CPR in the back of his police cruiser. Once they arrived, the boy was turned over to waiting personnel and successfully resuscitated.
"(I'm) really proud of both officers," Middletown Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw said. "An incident like that is so stressful for not only the family, but the officers as well. They stayed calm and did what they had to do to save a life. They both are incredible police officers."
Mosley said he was grateful to hear the child was recovering.
"By the grace of God, we were able to keep calm and just help that child out," he said. "That was my main mission for that call: To make sure no matter what I had to do, to make sure that child had to be okay.”
