Chicago Police Officer Thomas Norberg (right), Sergio Martinez Real (left) and Sergio's mother, Maribel Real (center). (Tribune / Chris Walker)
Chicago police Officer Thomas Norberg had just started his afternoon shift when a car pulled alongside his squad car on Montrose Avenue near Kimball Avenue.
While its horn blared and its lights flashed, the car's rear window rolled down and a woman inside frantically called for help.
"When I saw her face, I knew something was drastically wrong," Norberg, a 15-year-veteran, recalled.
"My baby's not breathing," the woman yelled.
Norberg met with reporters Friday to recount the events of a day earlier. As he spoke, the woman from the car, Maribel Real, 36, looked on, her 2-year-old son Sergio smiling and squirming in her arms.
When Norberg first saw the boy Thursday, he was slumped in a child's car seat, and his eyes were rolled back in his head.
Norberg called an ambulance, then rifled through his memory for the first-aid training he received at the police academy more than a decade ago.
"I thought he was dead, I thought he was gone," Norberg said. "(My) heart almost stopped."
But Norberg kept moving. He told the boy's father to turn off the car, pulled Sergio out of his seat and laid him on the ground on a blanket. Maribel Real told Norberg that the boy had been eating, then starting coughing and vomiting. They were on the way to the hospital.
Norberg turned the boy on his side and tapped him on the back several times to clear any obstructions. Then he put the boy on his back and did two-finger chest compressions while the boy's father did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
"It seemed like a long time," Norberg said. "A lot was going through my mind because I have two boys also."
Within seconds, Sergio abruptly began coughing and moving in their arms.
An ambulance arrived and rushed the boy to Swedish Covenant Hospital. Norberg went to the hospital and waited in the emergency room until he knew the boy was out of danger. It's unclear what caused the child to stop breathing.
"It's really indescribable," Norberg said at a news conference at the Albany Park District police station. "It was unbelievable that I was there right at that time, right when the light turned, and they happened to be directly behind me."
When Norberg finished, Real blinked back tears and thanked him for saving Sergio's life.
"If he wasn't there, my baby might have passed away," she said.
-- Andrew L. Wang and Cynthia Dizikes
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