The incident happened around 9:45 p.m. on April 16 in Trenton.
As soon as the transit officers approached a bus at N.J. Transit's Trenton station, a father frantically handed over his limp 3-year-old son.
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"We grabbed it, and it actually kind of flopped onto us. So that's when we realized something was wrong with the airway," said Sergeant Michael Filandro with New Jersey Transit Police.
The family had come from Texas on a chartered migrant bus. From there, they had tickets to New York City.
With the child unresponsive and not breathing, the emergency halted everything.
As the mother cried out, it became an all-out effort by Sergeant Filandro and K9 Officer Timothy Geoghegan to bring the child back to life.
"Sergeant grabbed the baby and started doing some back blows. I kind of was just trying to maintain the airway," Geoghegan said.
Whatever was lodged inside the child's airway, however, didn't seem to be moving.
"You can see when we try to pick the baby up again, it's just completely unresponsive and not breathing," Filandro said.
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Geoghegan says he then noticed the child's condition worsening.
"You could kind of see the kid's status going downhill a little bit, where he was starting to turn a little bit more blue, a little bit more gray," Geoghegan recalled.
The two knew it was time to get more help.
With Geoghegan driving, Filandro held the child in his lap on the way to the hospital, still working on him.
"I was kind of holding him like this, just doing compressions up against me in the seat," he said.
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Then, Filandro heard a sign of life.
"As soon as we heard the first kind of cry, a little cry or sigh, I was just kind of like, 'Oh man, I'm glad that it's breathing now,'" he said.