She wasn’t breathing. His index and middle fingers carefully pulsed the sternum of the 4-month-old baby girl. Hillsdale Police officer Ryan Tracy shook his head to clear the thought of his own daughter lying breathless, paramedics struggling to revive her.
As though they had practiced, Tracy and Officer Shelby Rathbun switched places. Rathbun continued the compressions as Tracy waited and watched the child’s mother looking frightened in the corner.
Just a few minutes ago he and his partner were driving through Hillsdale, on a typical night shift for the nine-year veteran Rathbun, and a typical training run for newcomer Tracy, when they heard the call- “unresponsive infant at Cherry Tree Village Apartments.” Rathbun shouted “Go!” and Tracy sped off.
The officers switched places again. Tracy began compressing and praying for a breath. Her blue lips were not blossoming into red. Her skin was still gray as her cells cried out for oxygen. Tracy didn’t know if she would ever breathe again.
Rathbun, while giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, was the first to see it — a flicker, a blink — her eyes opened. Tracy heard it next — a gasp for breath. Quiet and fragile, but it was a breath signaling she was alive. Her mother’s tears of sorrow turned into those of relief, her father grinned, and the officers passed the child into EMT paramedics’ arms.
The two officers said their minds remained blank as they followed the EMTs to the Hillsdale Community Health Center, but as soon as they were back in their car patrolling the streets again, both officers shed tears of joy — they had just saved a life.
Hillsdale Chief of Police Scott Hephner honored both officers Monday with a lifesaving award, which comes with a ribbon Rathbun and Tracy will place above the nametags on their uniforms. This was the first Life-Saving Award for both officers, and although Rathbun has received commendations from the Hillsdale Police Department before, the Life-Saving ribbon will be her and Tracy’s first uniform decoration.
“It’s not easy to resuscitate an infant, and their efforts saved this child’s life. I was very happy and honored to give them this award,” Hephner said.
The award recognized their valor in not only the infant case, however. Two weeks later, the pair found themselves again bent over an unresponsive human, struggling to pump breath into a dying man’s lungs.
While on patrol on Jan. 17, 2015, Tracy and Rathbun heard a call on the scanner asking for assistance with an unresponsive male in his 20s at the Hillsdale Motel, only a mile and a half away from their location, but a mile and a half outside their jurisdiction.
“I remembered hearing his age, and thinking that there was something fishy about the situation,” Rathbun said.
Her experiences with unresponsive 20 year olds usually involve drugs, and this one was no exception.
As Tracy asked his partner, “We’re going to that, right?” she was already on the phone with her sergeant, who didn’t hesitate in granting them permission to speed towards the motel, lights flashing.
When they burst into the room, they found the subject lying quietly on the carpet, his skin gray and lips white. Tracy remembered the infant from two weeks before and knew he would save this man, too.
Rathbun began compressing the man’s chest, and Tracy asked the nearby, hysteric woman what had happened. At first she refused to speak, and her silence was costing her friend his life. Once Tracy explained this, she admitted they had been taking heroin.
“She didn’t say anything after that — I was impressed that she told me that much,” Tracy said.
Just as Rathbun took over the compressions from Tracy, the Reading Emergency Unit arrived, and they applied EKG strips and AED pads to the man’s chest. Tracy told the paramedics that heroin was involved, and the AED pads were removed, anti-narcotic treatment applied. He breathed again.
“Both of them had been taking heroin; he had just left the hotel, taken some in his car, come back, taken some more — he took more than he should have,” Tracy said.
Because of their intuition in scanning the police radar — a practice that is not required of officers but one to which Rathbun adheres — and responding to a call outside their jurisdiction, Hephner said he was proud to award them the Life-Saving honor.
“They went above and beyond the call of duty, and we want to encourage that with these kinds of awards,” Hephner said.
In the infant case, which took place Dec. 30, 2014, no foul play was involved. Tracy explained that the child was born prematurely and that her immune system was weak, making the common cold she was suffering from potentially fatal.
“I honestly didn’t think we would save her. Her arms were stretched out on the floor, and she looked like she was already dead when we arrived,” Tracy said.
Rathbun has seen unresponsive infants before, but this was the first one she was able to save — most times they were dead on arrival and resuscitation was impossible, she said.
“I didn’t think about those other infants. I just focused on the child we were saving. She had so much life left to live, and I wanted to her to have it,” Rathbun said.
That evening, Tracy drove home to his wife, daughter, and three sons. He bent down, gave his daughter a hug and said, “I love you,” like he always did and thought about what he had done that morning. His hug — a little tighter than usual — meant little to her, but the world to him. His daughter was breathing, and he was grateful.
