Seeing his daughter motionless was the scariest thing that had ever happened to Jarnell Dukes. He told how, while on an errand with his two kids in the backseat on Sunday, his 7-year-old daughter, Kennedi, unexpectedly stopped breathing. She didn’t have her inhaler on her and was experiencing an asthma attack.
He told First Alert 4, “She says, ‘Dad, I can’t breathe, I need my air pump.’ I know it’s not in the car.’ We’re driving back to the house and she seizes up out of nowhere.”
Dukes, who was terrified and a long way from the nearest hospital, knocked on the front doors of Cahokia Heights City Hall after seeing police cruisers outside and found an unlikely savior, though he feared he had lost his daughter.
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Luckily for him, Mayor Curtis McCall was in his office when he arrived at the front door, holding his limp daughter. “She’s gone. I’m thinking, she’s gone,” Dukes recalled.
The Mayor said, “All of a sudden I heard someone screaming outside please help. I came down the hall out of my office and came to the front door and seen this gentlemen holding a child.”
He acted fast, and when he couldn’t locate a pulse in the 7-year-old, McCall, a retired cop, recalled his training.
“I laid her here, right down here,” McCall recounted. “I could tell she wasn’t breathing. I started CPR. I started with compressions. She’s a little young child, trying to be careful not to crush her ribs. I started compressions, after that, I did breathe in her mouth, gave several mouth-to-mouth. She was still unresponsive for what I believe was five minutes.”
After some minutes, she started responding. Even though she hadn’t completely recovered, he was relieved to hear her cough. Even so, the mayor kept performing CPR until the cops arrived. Dukes said his daughter did not breathe for 17 minutes.
Dukes credits his daughter’s survival to the quick-thinking mayor.
The proud father expressed, “Yes sir, Yes sir, most definitely. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know he was the mayor. He’s my hero now. I know his name now. He is my hero and my daughter’s hero.”
As for Mayor McCall, he described himself as a public servant who hopes that this story will inspire everyone to learn CPR.
“Learn how to save someone’s life. I never used it in 20 years as a law enforcement officer. Lo and behold, I’d have to use this training as a mayor,” he said.
