Toll workers call 911, administer CPR

Quick thinking by Indiana toll attendants Marlene Hemrick and Joseph Rauen helped save the life of a 2-year-old child who stopped breathing.

Hemrick and Rauen, both members of the Indiana Unity Team, were working at the Angola Toll Plaza in northeast Indiana when a car pulled into a lane—heading the wrong direction—around 6:45 p.m. Dec. 20.

“I was going to wave the car back,” says Hemrick, “[until] I saw a lady with a baby in her arms saying, ‘Help me, help me.’”

“The mother was screaming that the child was not breathing,” recalls Rauen.

Hemrick took the boy into her booth and called 911. Meanwhile, Rauen closed his traffic lane and rushed to the boy’s side. “The child was in and out of consciousness,” says Rauen, a Red Cross-trained CPR instructor.

As the pair waited for emergency services to arrive, Rauen assessed the boy’s condition—checking his airways and his pupils, among other things. Then the boy stopped breathing. “He started turning blue and his eyes rolled back into his head,” says Rauen, who performed CPR until emergency crews arrived.

“It is hard seeing a little boy in that kind of condition,” says Rauen, who kept his cool under the pressure. “I just wanted to make sure he was safe. I wasn’t thinking of anything else.”

The traffic backup—20 to 30 vehicles in Hemrick’s lane alone, she estimates—may have been far from the minds of Rauen and Hemrick, but it was not for their colleagues Jim Laughlin, who cut his dinner break short, and Rose Owsley, who was working another lane.

Laughlin and Owsley “were basically running all the traffic, and it was backed up due to the incident,” says Rauen. “Everybody worked really well together.”