(11 Alive) – It isn’t hard to see the bond between a Greenville, Ga. police officer and the 2-month-old baby girl he saved.
For officer Kenneth Knox, the connection with little Ma’Yavie was almost instant. “She’s not wiggling, she’s not fussing,” he said. “There’s just nothing like it.”
But the coos and sweet smile from Ma’Yavie are a far cry from the state Knox found the baby earlier this month.
Knox was responding to the baby’s home after her parents made a frantic 911 call to police, telling the dispatcher their daughter couldn’t breathe. By the time Knox responded, the circumstances looked grim.
“She had turned a blueish-purple and her eyes had glazed over. She was not breathing,” he recounted to 11Alive’s Kaitlyn Ross. “They were screaming, ‘Please save my baby!’ and the baby was limp.”
Ma’Yavie was choking on the cereal her parents fed her an hour before. The Greenville officer laid the 2-month-old on the floor, but couldn’t find a pulse. Desperate, he sucked the cereal out of her throat, and she started breathing again immediately.
“I swear to God, that just for a second, she looked up at me and smiled,” Knox said. Still shaken from the experience, he wrote about the incident on his Facebook page, saying when Ma’Yavie started crying, it was music to his ears. The post has since garnered tens-of-thousands of shares.
Knox said he’s been an officer for 25 years, but nothing has ever come close to this experience.
“Nothing’s ever touched me or changed me like this,” he told 11Alive. “This will change me for the rest of my life.”
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