An Ohio police officer used a LifeVac device to remove a toy that a 2-year-old was choking on.
An Ohio police officer saved a 2-year-old choking toddler using a LifeVac device.
Bodycam video showed a police officer rushing to a family’s home and retrieving a portable airway-clearing device from the trunk of his car before helping the child.
The officer utilized the device and was successfully able to remove a 2-inch-long toy nail, that the toddler was choking on.
LifeVac is a suction device designed to remove food or objects lodged in an airway.
A LifeVac was used to save 10-month-old Gabriel in November 2021 after he choked on a piece of a pancake. When the Heimlich maneuver did not work, one man, Major Hillard immediately got up and got a LifeVac from his car.
Hillard used the LifeVac to remove the obstruction from little Gabriel’s mouth. After several plunges of the device, Gabriel started breathing again.
A special event in June celebrated 1,000 lives saved by LifeVac, where Inside Edition met with Gabriel’s family and the man who saved his life.
“I’m just happy I could help at least just one person and through the effect of that and obviously [Inside Edition] to be able to help others not have that unfortunate circumstance and that loss of life. I mean, that’s just awesome,” Hillard told Inside Edition.
Of the 1,000 lives saved by LifeVac, 63 of them were saved thanks to viewers learning about the device on Inside Edition.
“Thank you to everyone who watched Inside Edition and were inspired first by baby Gabriel and then the other families whose stories we’ve shared to go out there and get a LifeVac,” Inside Edition’s Deborah Norville said at the event.
The founder and CEO of LifeVac, Arthur Lih, tells Inside Edition he invented the device in his garage.
“I simplified it down to ‘it’s stuck in a pipe. Who unclogs pipes? Plumbers.’ So I went and looked in the plumber aisle, saw a little plunger, put it on my face, felt it pull it and I just re-engineered it to pull instead of push,” Lih says.
“I can’t help but wonder how many amazing things are going to happen because the people who might have died from choking, didn’t,” Norville said.
A child chokes to death every five days in the United States.
