What happens when a car crashes into a canal, sinks, and traps a child in the backseat underwater?
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“The call went out, a child in danger, and that is what all cops fear,” said Sgt. Edward Webster of the Miami-Dade Police Department’s South District Station in Cutler Bay.
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Police released body cam footage of the rescue of a 3-year-old boy who was trapped in a car that went off the road, down a steep embankment and plunged into a canal under a bridge near Southwest 232nd Street and 127th Avenue on Feb. 27.
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“This one’s different. As a father, when you hear a child is underwater in a vehicle and their parents can’t get them out, the first emotion that clicks in your head is go,” said Officer Emanuel Walton III.
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Officers raced to a sunny setting at the bridge that day, but the afternoon rays couldn’t pierce the gloom around the submerged car.
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Walton went in.
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“I couldn’t see through the water,” he said in a video released by police and posted on the department’s Facebook and Twitter pages. “I had to come up a couple of times and basically use touch to see what was going on inside the vehicle.”
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Walton said he felt the car seat, but finding the seat belt latch in the murky setting was near impossible. He said he pulled the seat as hard as he could, and eventually the seat gave way.
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“The child was able to pop up to the top and I handed him off as soon as I could.”
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The next challenge, Webster said, was getting the child up the steep embankment and onto the ground for CPR. The boy was unresponsive.
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Soon there was a sound.
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“When the baby started crying I started crying, too, because it was the best cry I ever heard in my life,” Officer Junior Clervil said in the video. The child was raced to Baptist Health Homestead Hospital, WPLG reported.
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Clervil rode with the child in the back of the ambulance. “I wasn’t going to let go,” he said.
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The accident? “Sad to see but a great end,” Webster said.
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