Mass. Officer Answering Call Helps Revive Baby

Dec. 27, 2013
Barnstable Officer Dennis Stampfl's calm instructions over the phone helped save the 9-week-old baby.

MARSTONS MILLS, Mass. -- A Barnstable police officer's calm instructions over the phone helped revive a 9-week-old baby who was choking on Christmas day.

Officer Dennis Stampfl answered a 911 call from a woman on Mockingbird Lane on Christmas afternoon that a 9-week old baby had stopped breathing and was blue in the face, said Sgt. Sean Sweeney.

In the 911 tape, the panicked woman describes how the baby, whose name is Brandon, had been eating when he vomited and then choked.

The woman who called 911 was breathing hard out of fear, but she was able to communicate Stampfl's precise instructions to Jonathan Brooks, Brandon's father.

Stampfl told them to turn the baby over, rest him facedown on Brooks' forearm with his face near his father's hand, and give him five back blows between the shoulder blades.

After Brooks did a series of back blows, a baby's cries could be heard in the background on the 911 tape.

"That is the thing you want to hear," Stampfl told the woman.

An ambulance crew took Brandon to Cape Cod Hospital where he stayed overnight for treatment for an acid reflux condition, his mother, Samantha D'Elia, said Thursday.

D'Elia said she also administered CPR to her baby.

Christmas could have been better, D'Elia admitted, "but the outcome was alright."

The Barnstable Police Department recently received a $126,121 grant from the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security to train and update training for 82 telecommunicators, including dispatchers, and 10 new police officers in emergency medical dispatch.

Everyone currently assigned to the communications desk has had the training, Sweeney said.

Copyright 2013 - Cape Cod Times, Hyannis, Mass.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

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