Hero cop jumps off 30-foot overpass to save life of 12-year-old boy who leapt off it moments before
New York police officer, Jessie Ferreira Cavallo, was heading to work on August 3 when she noticed a boy running along the Saw Mill River Parkway in Yonkers. And within no time, the 12-year-old climbed over a guardrail and jumped several feet from the overpass onto the concrete below, leaving her stunned.
But even in her state of absolute horror, Cavallo was clear about one thing, that she had to act and act pretty fast. Seeing the boy laying motionless on the ground below, the officer parked her car along the Saw Mill River Parkway, grabbed as many medical supplies as she had in her trunk and immediately jumped to the rescue.
"Everything happened so fast and I think my adrenaline was pumping so high," she said. "He just climbed up and jumped off."
"I wasn't thinking too much," she said. "I just knew, when I looked down and saw him ... he looked dead. I couldn't see anything other than blood. I thought to myself, 'He needs help. I need to help him.'"
She also said that there was another woman in a military uniform, later identified as Laura Yakaboski, a Yonkers police officer who was off-duty at the time, also stopped to help her with the boy. "Both me and her together, we were able to aid him and assist him," she said.
Cavallo said that when she found the boy, he was unresponsive. So she, along with the military woman officer put a neck brace and a splint on him and checked his airway. "We were talking to each other like we worked together," she said of the other woman.
After a while, even though the young boy did open his eyes, he was still quite unresponsive. "I was talking," she said. "He wasn't really responding back." The 12-year-old was then rushed to the hospital, He was then being treated for a broken arm, broken nose, and leg injuries. However, he is expected to survive and is currently in recovery after the shocking incident.
Kieran O'Leary, the Westchester County, New York police spokesman later revealed that the county police had been informed the day of the incident that a young boy believed to be a Bronx native, had taken off from the Andrus campus in Yonkers, New York. For all those who aren't aware of this, Andrus is a private, nonprofit organization which aims to provide services for vulnerable children, children with special needs, and children with severe emotional and behavior issues, as per their website.
It was reported that the staff at Andrus followed the boy and were speaking to him on the parkway when he ended up plummeting onto Tuckahoe Road. However, it is still not clear as to how far the fall was. And it wasn't until an entire day had passed that Cavallo understood the gravity of the situation that she had found herself in the previous day. "Friday, after this whole thing happened, I went to work and worked till 11 pm," she said.
"I didn't realize what was going on until yesterday," she said later. "That's when it hit me. I didn't realize how high it was. It seemed doable. It didn't seem that high. I thought I jumped over a brick wall or a cement barrier. It was so fast. It was more like tunnel vision. I saw the boy and I needed to get to him. I didn't see anything else."