No one yet knows where life’s journey will lead the baby girl Riverhead police saved on the side of the road in Wading River Sunday night, but one thing it is certain: it’s a journey she would not have the privilege to take had it not been for the quick and expert intervention of three well-trained police officers.
To hear Police Officers Daniel Hogan and Patryk Loszewski tell it, though, it was all in a day’s work.
“You just do what you have to do,” Hogan said in an interview yesterday. “We’re in the spotlight for this right now, but the ambulance members do this every day.”
The two officers, members of Riverhead’s C.O.P.E. unit, happened to be at Route 25A and Wading River Manor Road when the call for an unresponsive child came over the radio around 6:30 that night. The child in distress was in a vehicle outside the Subway sandwich shop just one mile to the west. The officers were there within seconds.
They found the frightened family standing in the shoulder of the road near their vehicle. The mother held out her 18-month-year-old daughter as they ran toward her. As soon as the officers saw her, they knew they needed to act fast.
“She was stiff,” Hogan said. “Her chest wasn’t moving up and down. There was no pulse, no heartbeat.”
What happened next came in a rush of adrenaline and quick thinking. Though neither man had performed CPR on a baby before, Hogan laid the baby girl down in the back of the police SUV and began chest compressions as Loszewski administered oxygen.
“I did a couple of chest compressions and she came to,” Hogan said.“It was amazing once she started breathing how quickly she came back. It could have been a very sad situation.”
He said the magnitude of what they did that night didn’t really hit him until he was home talking with his wife later on.
It wasn’t lost on Center Moriches resident Sue Lynch, who said when she saw the story on RiverheadLOCAL Monday night she got “flashbacks” and began to cry.
Nearly 36 years ago, a pair of Riverhead’s finest saved her own one-month-old baby girl.
Lynch was at her mother’s Osborn Avenue home when she put the baby down for a nap in a bassinet in her mother’s bedroom. She took a walk to Polish Town to pick up a newspaper. A short time later, her mother checked on the baby and found her blue and unresponsive. She called police. Within minutes, Police Officer Fred Rodgers and Sgt. August (“Mike”) Grossman were there. Rodgers revived the baby in the back seat of Grossman’s cruiser as he raced to Central Suffolk Hospital.
“If it weren’t for Riverhead police officers, I wouldn’t be here today,” Renee Mitchell said in an interview this afternoon, her voice shaking with emotion.
Mitchell, who will turn 36 next month, now lives in North Carolina with two children of her own. Her daughter Alanah just turned 5, and her son Matthew, 17, will graduate from high school this year.
“To look at my children and just think that they wouldn’t be here either – it just makes me emotional,” Mitchell said. “Reading that story the other day, I was in tears for that family.”
Mother and daughter still give Rodgers a big hug whenever they run into him around town.
“To this day, he carries a little picture of her in his wallet,” Lynch said.
“It was one of the happiest days of my police career,” Rodgers said in an interview today. It would prove to be the only time he saved a baby’s life.
“The kid was blue. I thought she was going,” he recalled today. “Of course I knew the family and the grandmother handed me the baby and cried, ‘Freddy I don’t know what to do,’ and I said, ‘I got her. Relax.’ I started doing CPR and Mike arrived and I jumped in the back of Mike’s car and he drove to the hospital. I can’t even imagine how fast he was going,” Rodgers recalled with a chuckle. “The nurses came running out to us when we got there and took her.”
Rodgers, long retired from the Riverhead PD, worked as a part-time county parks police officer for 22 years and is now a sergeant with the park rangers. “You do what you gotta do,” he said. “You only go around once. You do the best you can.”
“To know that these police officers are not only out there getting the bad guys, but they’re also saving babies – it’s beautiful,” Mitchell said.
At Riverhead Police headquarters last night, Hogan, 28, and Loszewski, 29, who both joined the Riverhead PD in December 2012, stressed they were just doing their jobs.
“We did what we were supposed to do,” Hogan said. “It’s what we’re trained for.”
“Thankfully we had the training,” Loszewski said. Officer Dennis Cavanagh, who runs the department’s CPR training program, is an excellent teacher, the officers said.
Police Officer Branden Heller, who was patrolling Wading River Sunday night, arrived on scene right after them and assisted.
Just as the little girl began breathing again — and even became responsive to the officers’ voices — Wading River Fire Department Rescue arrived. Hogan handed her over to EMTs, who treated her and brought her to the hospital.
“We got in the car and said, ‘Holy cow, that could have been bad,’” Hogan said last night.
What did they do next?
The two young cops, seated at a table in the department’s interview room, looked at each other and shrugged.
“We went on another call,” Hogan said, smiling broadly, as Loszewski nodded.
The child has been discharged from the hospital and is doing well, according to Sergeant Jill Kubetz. The officers said they both were deeply relieved when they heard she had been sent home.
Her family declined an interview, Kubetz said. “They are very grateful and we are all so grateful for this happy ending.”
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