Police dispatcher, officer credited with helping save man from choking
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BLUE MOUND, Texas (KTVT) — A police dispatcher and officer in the Tarrant County city of Blue Mound are being credited with acting fast to save a man from choking. A camera captured the event from inside the front door of a police station.
When a man walked in the Blue Mound Police Department and rang the bell at the front window, it’s didn’t immediately appear like anything out of the ordinary.
But seconds before this, images from cameras outside the building gave dispatcher Cristal Buckner a clue something wasn’t right.
“When I saw the car speeding through the parking lot and coming to an abrupt stop, that’s when I knew something was up,” Buckner said.
She couldn’t understand what the man was saying.
“But I knew right when it was like, dire,” she said.
Blue Mound is a small city and officers are not usually far away. That night, Sgt. Lincoln Matheny was just a few feet away and was handling paperwork.
“It was totally, she comes running back, hey there’s an emergency in the lobby,” Matheny said.
“I of course went straight to the Heimlich maneuver, pulling on him twice, could tell he was coughing a little bit more, catching his breath, so got him to stabilize a little bit, got him a chair to sit in,” he added.
They called for paramedics, but the man said he was fine.
He had choked on a bite of dinner that his wife had brought to him at work. She got him in a car and floored it to the first place she could think of to get help.
“Instinct just kind of took over and kicked in. The training we go through, just kinda dinged in your head and you fly into action,” Buckner said.
It was instinct but maybe also experience from employees who earlier that day were awarded officer and dispatcher of the year honors from the department.
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