A heroic New York EMT who tried in vain last week to save a 7-year-old school girl choking on her lunch said he was suspended because it is against company policy to make a stop without being called.
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Noelia Echavarria, a second-grader, has been declared brain dead – and her mother says there are more questions than answers in this case. Authorities said she choked at school on Wednesday, but there hasn’t been a definitive answer as to what she was eating, if anything. I want them to tell me the reason they let my daughter be like that in the hospital. EMT Qwasie Reid just happened to be driving by in a private ambulance when someone ran out of the school crying for help. Reid was stopped at a red light when a school safety officer and another person started banging on his door for help.
“The biggest question is if someones is choking they should be prepared to deal with a situation like this”, David Perecman said.
NBC 4 New York asked the Department of Education how quickly 911 was called and it said the school followed protocol by calling 911 and the girl’s parents, but did not offer further explanation.
And in a statement, the department said that it believed the principal and faculty “responded swiftly to the emergency”. The family was called about the incident and the girl’s uncle was the first family member to arrive at the school, notified by the girl’s mother. No one at the school was rendering first aid, he said.
But seeing trouble at PS 250, Reid quickly exited the vehicle and ran into the school – leaving his patient with his partner, a nursing home aide who had been in the back of the ambulance with him. “Nobody was doing anything”, Reid told the New York Daily News. The family also suspects that the girl choked on the sandwich because she was rushing to finish, having been asked to hurry in previous occasions by teachers. Never did Ana Santiago expect to find her daughter, Noelia-Lisa, on life support after a day at school. The medic, Qwasi Reid, who works for Assist Ambulance in Brooklyn, said that Noelia was already turning blue, which indicates that it was a while that she has choked. “I cleared the airway”.
Reid was working for a company called Assist Ambulance and had been transporting an elderly man in stable condition from an eye clinic to a nursing home.
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This all apparently happened before the school staffer flagged down the EMT.
