Mark Rubins, a New York Police detective, saved a boy choking on popcorn Wednesday during a Police Academy graduation at Madison Square Garden, WABC-TV reported.
Rubins, a paramedic and member of the New York Police Department's financial crimes task force, was attending the graduation when the mother of the 1-year-old boy called out for help, the television station said.
The boy, Daniel Escorcia, is the son of newly minted NYPD officer Leonardo Escorcia, who participated in the Police Academy Recruit Graduation, WABC-TV said. Rubins and Lt. Greg Besson raced to the family where the boy was choking, per the television station.
"The baby was limp in her arms and his lips were blue," Rubins, who has 20 years of paramedic training behind him, told the New York Daily News. He said performed CPR to get the child respond, per the newspaper.
"He started to spit up a bit, which I still have on my shoulder," Rubins said, according to the Daily News. "He was still lethargic, but he wasn't blue anymore and his pulse was strong."
Escorcia, who was sitting in Madison Square Garden theater's main level with the rest of the graduating officers, heard his wife and ran to the scene as well, the Daily News wrote.
"I started running toward her," Escorcia told the newspaper. "By the time I got there, I saw Detective Rubins — he had my son on his shoulder. My son seemed like he was not himself. He was pale. He kept passing out by the time I got there."
WABC-TV reported that the boy was first taken to a Madison Square Garden EMS station before being taken to St. Luke's Hospital for evaluation.
"When they told us we should take him to the hospital, I knew I had to miss graduation," Escorcia, who is assigned to 79th Precinct in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant area, told the Daily News. "But family comes first."
Rubins, who joined the NYPD in 2006, works two days a month as a paramedic in Westchester County. He said it was "a phenomenal feeling," to help save the child, the Daily News wrote.
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