CBS NewsA high school cheerleader sprung into action after spotting a toddler choking in the crowd, saving the little boy’s life.
Tyra Winters, a student from Rockwall High School near Dallas, Texas, has been praised for her quick-thinking at the local homecoming parade.
The 17-year-old told ABC News murmurs of a young child choking among the spectators started to spread around her squad and the football team. It was only when she scanned the crowd that she noticed a toddler’s face turning ‘super, super red’.
Check out the local news report below:
The toddler was choking on a piece of candy, and his mum couldn’t seem to help him. Winters didn’t think twice – she jumped off the float, grabbing the child and performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on him.
As reported by CBS News, Winters said:
He was turning purple, so I immediately jumped off the float, I ran down to the kiddo, and I was like, ‘I got him’, and I grabbed him from the mom.
I grabbed him and tilted him and I gave a good three back thrusts and he ended up spitting up.
On Tuesday (October 1), Winters got to meet Nicole Hornback and her two-year-old son, Clarke, for the first time since her homecoming heroics.
CBS NewsHornback said ‘to feel so useless as a mother’ was the most terrifying thing in her life. ‘I just literally was holding him out and just running through the crowd trying to hand him off to anyone,’ she told ABC News.
Hornback told CBS News:
I was sitting right next to him. I just happened to look over. There was no noise, no coughing, no breathing. It was at that moment I tried to give him the Heimlich, and I’ve never taken a class.
[Winters] saved my baby. I commend her for being a teenager and being trained.
CBS NewsAs for Winters, she’s just thankful she could be there for the young boy when he needed help most. After learning the Heimlich from her mum, ‘I knew exactly what to do from that point on,’ she said.
While Clarke didn’t really remember his high school hero – ‘It’s hard for him because he’s so young, he doesn’t even remember what he ate for breakfast,’ Hornback said – the pair shared a high-five.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.