A New Jersey transit officer performed life-saving CPR on a lifeless baby born moments earlier in a bathroom stall.
On July 14 at 10 a.m., officers at Newark Penn Station responded to a medical event in the women’s washroom. When they arrived, they found a woman cradling a newborn baby in her arms.
In a video shared by the New Jersey Transit Police Department (NJTPD), officer Bryan Richards can be seen taking the unresponsive baby from her mother’s arms, beginning chest compressions in a bathroom sink.
Richards called for an emergency response team, rushing the newborn to a police car alongside officer Alberto Nunes, who drove them to a nearby hospital.
Eventually, after continuing CPR, the baby began to breathe.
“Working here, you see a lot of things, but expecting a baby in a mother’s arms that’s a newborn, that’s nothing that we would expect,” Richards told NBC New York. “I took possession of the baby to do the assessment on it. We didn’t know how long the baby was in this world.”
Richards had 12 years of experience as an EMT before moving into his current role with the NJTPD. He and Nunes knew what they had to do.
At the time, they weren’t sure the baby was going to make it. But then they heard it — a cry.
“I was so happy, so excited that I heard the baby crying because that meant the baby was breathing,” Nunes said.
“It’s already high stress, high adrenaline, but once I had the baby crying, it was a big sigh of relief,” Richards added. “A happy moment that the baby was crying, and everything we were doing was helping.”
The newborn remains at University Hospital but is “doing well,” the Facebook post says.
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