By Amanda Spence
LOS ANGELES — An LAPD officer is being hailed a hero after saving a child who wasn’t breathing last week.
According to Fox 11, Officer Nick Ferara was at the front desk at the Los Angeles Police Department Harbor Division Station when a parent was heard screaming for help. The incident was caught on body camera footage, which shows the boy’s father carrying the child toward a bathroom. Ferara springs into action, holding the child and patting him on the back in an effort to perform CPR.
“I don’t know if he’s breathing right now. Come on, breathe,” Ferara can be heard saying.
The boy’s father told Ferara his son was choking and also had chronic seizures since birth.
“I picked up the baby and when I did, he started gasping for air but no air was going into the mouth, something was blocking it, and then he started going limp. And that’s when I got on my knee. Placed the baby on my knee, facing toward the ground, started hitting it in the back and then the baby stopped moving. So I put the child to my ear, heard the heart racing super-fast, but couldn’t hear or feel lungs moving at all. I was terrified,” Ferara said during a press conference.
Ferara continued CPR as the boy’s father splashed water on his son. “I think he’s breathing,” the officer says. The boy, who was taken to a hospital, is expected to recover. Ferara said it was the first time he ever saved a life.
“It was very tough mentally to deal with that. Even though everything worked out great, but then you start playing in your mind what if it didn’t and that’s what really scared me,” he said.