Casula toddler rescue: Hero cops reunite with kids in near-drowning
The quick thinking actions of three police officers ultimately turned out to be the difference between life and death for two two-year-old cousins pulled unconscious and without a pulse from a pool in Casula. SEE THE EMOTIONAL REUNION VIDEO
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Young mum Badriah Al-Achrafe was laughing with her siblings at their weekly get-together when she realised her little daughter and nephew had disappeared.
The 30-year-old and her family began frantically searching their parents’ Casula home for Destiny and Osman, both aged 2, on July 18 but they were nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly Ms Al-Achrafe’s seven-year-old niece screamed after finding the two toddlers unconscious in the backyard pool.
“We all heard ‘mum, mum they‘re here’ — that’s what she was saying,” Ms Al-Achrafe told The Daily Telegraph.
“It was crazy, I was numb, my heart sank — it was just that disgusting feeling at the bottom of your stomach.
“My sister jumped into the pool, she grabbed both of them out. I started CPR instantly.”
Ms Al-Achrafe and her family began desperately trying to revive Destiny and Osman but they could not feel any pulse on their little soaked bodies and no breathing from either toddler.
Soon three brave police officers ran into the property and began performing CPR on the cousins in the driveway as paramedics were called.
Sergeant Mick McClafferty started doing compressions on Osman and Senior Constable Peter Heginbotham worked on Destiny while Senior Constable Victor Suarez held her delicate head in position because she was so little.
Miraculously, the police officers somehow managed to keep the pair alive, performing CPR right until they were placed in ambulances and rushed to hospital.
But Ms Al-Achrafe and her family’s nightmare was not over yet.
Doctors were forced to place the two toddlers into comas, telling her and Osman’s mother to prepare for the worst.
“They were just telling us to get prepared either for them never waking up from the coma (or) them receiving brain damage,“ Ms Al-Achrafe said.
After a week of keeping a bedside vigil the family got the news they had desperately being waiting for from a doctor — the cousins were going to make a full recovery and there was no brain damage, only sprained necks due to the marathon CPR efforts of the duo’s rescuers.
“I was just looking at him with disbelief,“ Ms Al-Achrafe said.
“He came into my room first and told us that the results are back and I just want to let you guys know that there’s no brain damage — I’m just looking at him with disbelief, like, ‘Are you sure, are you serious?’
“That’s when we started praying. It was crazy. It was so overwhelming.”
After an emotional reunion between the officers and Destiny and Osman at Liverpool this week, Ms Al-Achrafe confirmed that the heroes in blue had undoubtedly saved the lives of the two children.
“You hear stories … the police are no good, the police are this, the police are that, no, that is not how it is, it’s completely different,” she said.
“People only see the bad, they only hear the bad, but … they were just amazing I don’t know what else to say, I don’t know how to put it in words – they were just bloody amazing.”
She also said the experience underlined how important it was for everyone to learn CPR.
“People should know how to do it, whether you have children or not … everyone should know how to do CPR because you don’t know when you’re going to use it,” she said.
Destiny’s dad Heman Shrief, 34, said people sometimes did not appreciate the work police did while on the job.
“You hear (negative reports about police) in media or read it on Facebook or any social media platform, but seeing is different to hearing – what they did for us we’ll be forever grateful (for),” he said.
“The work that they do, there’s no joke about it. These guys are putting themselves in front of us to save our lives basically. It’s something that you can’t thank them enough for, thank you is not enough, honestly, thank you is not enough. I’m forever in debt to them, they saved my daughter.”
However, a modest Sergeant McClafferty insisted that he wasn’t the hero in the scenario.
“Absolutely not — the only two heroes here are Destiny and Osman,” he said.
“The fight they put up and their will to live, they’re definitely the heroes.”
He agreed with Ms Al-Achrafe that the incident underlined the need for everyone to learn how to do CPR.
“It’s a skill you hope you never use, but it’s a skill everyone should have,” he said.
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“Without family members doing their best efforts and police turning up, definitely those children wouldn’t be with us today.
“It was horrific, Peter and I both have children as well, so you have that personal connection of imagining it was your own children at the time.”
University of Sydney injury epidemiologist Dr Lisa Sharwood said everything hangs in the balance when somebody stops breathing and doesn’t have a pulse.
“If somebody is not breathing and doesn’t have a pulse you’re not always going to get (them back),” she said.
Dr Sharwood said things could have turned out differently had not the three police officers been professionally trained on CPR and she called on everyone to learn it.
“The most important thing is getting the heart circulation going, which is why all emergency services are trained (in CPR), not just medical responders,” she said.
“From my professional perspective, everyone should learn CPR.”
Professor Bev Biggs, a doctor who consults for the World Health Organisation, said family members and police got to the two toddlers “in the nick of time”.
“They must have fallen in the pool, inhaled a lot of water and not got enough oxygen and the heart stopped,” she said.
“Once your heart stops pumping you kind of stop breathing, you’re essentially dead but you can be revived.
“If you find someone collapsed in the street with no pulse, the no pulse is the signal to do CPR.
“You never do CPR on someone with a pulse because that means the heart is actually pumping.”