Two heroic police officers are being lauded by a Chicago family for saving an 11-month-old gunshot victim after his mother and grandmother were both shot dead.
Baby Princeton Chew was bleeding out when officers John Conneely and Michael Modzelewski found the child in a home on the South Side of Chicago. Protocol for officers is to not move people or evidence from crime scenes, but the cops broke the rules and rushed the bloody baby to the hospital in a bid to save his life.
“When we arrived on the scene it was very chaotic,” Conneely told NBC5 Chicago.“We were approached by the woman [Chew’s aunt] carrying the 11-month-old who was bleeding and crying, screaming and everything like that, and with no ambulances on the scene we decided to make the decision to get this child to the hospital as quickly as we could to try to save his life.”
The child’s two-months pregnant mother Patricia Chew and grandmother Lolita Wells were both shot and killed by the unidentified murderer after the family returned from a Monday afternoon outing.
The surviving family members praised the cops for their quick thinking and willingness to bend the rules to save the child. (RELATED: Former Inmate Prays For Safety Of Police)
“He didn’t have to do that, he could’ve waited on the ambulance,” Chew’s cousin Kira Goban told Fox32. “But he chose to put the baby in the car and take the baby to the hospital.”
According to reports, the officers were about nine miles from the closest hospital when they wrapped the bleeding baby in a blanket, applied pressure to his wound and sped-off in their squad car to get him help.
But the family wasn’t the only ones praising the officers. At the Chicago P.D.’s press conference on Tuesday, the cops’s Superintendent raved about the heroism of Conneely and Modzelewski.
“They made a decision, and honestly it goes against protocol, to remove a victim from the scene unless it’s a dire circumstance,” Superintendent Garry McCarthy said at the press meeting. “But they made a decision, as it turns out it probably saved a life.”
The decision to save the child was instant, according to to Modzelewski, who was especially moved by the scene due to him having a son of his own who is just a little older than the recovering Chew.
The police officers do not want to be called heroes, however, and claimed these types of situations happen all the time and they don’t need special attention for their deeds.
“This is just a very small sliver of something that police officers do all over the country that never gets any type of recognition,” Conneely, a 16-year police veteran told the Chicago Tribune. “Stories like this happen all the time that never get recognized.”
The baby is in stable condition at the hospital is expected to make a full recovery, according to WGNTV.com