A 4-year-old boy’s 911 call for help is credited with helping save his mother’s life.
The boy dialed 911 from a cell phone in his home on Thursday afternoon and told the Polk County sheriff’s dispatcher: “Um, my mommy doesn’t feel good.”
According to a recording of the 911 call released to the media, dispatcher Maggie Brodeur spends the next 14 minutes or so engaging in a question-and-answer with the boy, trying to elicit enough information to pinpoint his location and the nature of his mother’s ailment.
The boy is unable to tell Brodeur what his address is or what city he lives in. (Police would later learn the boy and his mother had moved to Urbandale just two weeks earlier.)
But one thing the boy knows for certain, and repeats calmly several times during the call: “Mommy’s passed out.”
Brodeur keeps the boy on the phone while she and other dispatchers try to narrow down the cell phone signal.
“She can’t speak. Because she passed out. Nobody here to take care of her,” the boy tells Brodeur.
“You are doing really, really good and we have people on the way to help your mommy,” the dispatcher reassures him.
She asks him if there are any distinguishable markers like flagpoles or basketball hoops outside the home, and whether he can read off the license plate of his mother’s car parked outside.
No luck, but eventually, the boy indicates he can see or hear sirens.
“I think the bad guys are coming,” he says.
“No, the good guys are coming. They’re going to help your mommy,” Brodeur tells him.
The boy then tells the dispatcher he can see a “big red truck” outside.
“I’m over here! I’m over here,” he can be heard yelling. “They’re right by my house.”
An emergency medical official enters, and the boy can be heard telling him, “My mommy’s in trouble. My mommy’s passed out.”
Officer Randy Peterson, a spokesman for the Urbandale Police Department, said medics administered aid to the unconscious mother and revived her. She was not hospitalized.
Peterson credited the boy’s levelheadedness with saving his mother’s life.
Police did not release the names of the boy and his mother, and would not go into detail about the nature of the mother’s ailment.
But Peterson told msnbc.com on Tuesday: “This was a situation where if she did not get help immediately she would have passed away. He definitely saved her life.”
Peterson said authorities visited the boy and his mother the day after the incident and she was “doing much better.”
As for the boy, “he was a lot calmer than most adults in that situation,” Peterson said.