Two NYPD officers reunited with the mother and baby they rescued from a choking emergency in the Bronx, one week after the frantic roadside save.
Officers Julio Arias and Karolin Abreu Garcia, both assigned to the South Bronx, were driving to an unrelated call on Sept. 26 when a passerby flagged them down near Grand Concourse and East 168th Street. The person shouted that a baby was not breathing and pointed toward a nearby apartment building, Garcia said during the emotional meeting Friday outside the 44th Precinct.
The partners made a U-turn and found 21-year-old Janibel Montana in the street, clutching her limp 10-month-old son and screaming for help. Body camera footage captured the scene: little Jheyler Montero dressed in a dinosaur costume, unresponsive in his mother’s arms.
Arias took the baby and began delivering backslaps to clear the airway.
“I was giving him the backslaps,” Arias said at the reunion. “I had felt something fall off, and that’s when he started crying, started breathing again.”
The infant began crying less than a minute after Arias started the lifesaving maneuver. An object struck Arias’s boot, though neither the officers nor the family ever identified what had blocked Jheyler’s airway.
Garcia described her own relief in visceral terms.
“I feel like I was breathing again when I saw the baby crying. I noticed I wasn’t breathing either,” she admitted.
The officers ensured Jheyler was transported to a hospital, then returned later to check on his condition.
Montana had been preparing food while Jheyler played in his crib when the room went silent. She attempted to assist him before running outside to scream for help, according to a translation provided by Garcia. She still does not know what her son choked on.
At Friday’s reunion, Montana embraced the officers as “mis héroes” — my heroes in Spanish. The officers passed the baby between them; Jheyler turns 11 months old on Saturday.
Arias, a father of two, had never before performed that maneuver on a child.
“I know this is a parent’s worst nightmare,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that if I wasn’t able to do anything, I would just be able to save him long enough for EMS.”
Montana offered a warning to other parents: keep small objects out of children’s reach and maintain close supervision.
The rescue came together in seconds on a Bronx street corner, with a passerby’s alert, a quick U-turn, and backslaps that restored breath to a dinosaur-costumed baby whose mother had run out of options.
The reunion marked one week since the officers intervened in what they initially expected to be an ordinary patrol afternoon.