NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (WAVY) — Two people at Ella Fitzgerald Middle School in Newport News are being credited with helping save a student who was choking.
It’s a job well-done for an Army veteran and the security officer who jumped in when they saw seventh-grader Matheieu Shew in distress.
Matheieu had been eating kiwi and talking with friends in the cafeteria during lunch one day last week when he began choking.
“I realized I ate it in a bad way,” Matheieu said. “I went to him, I was [alerting] him that I was choking.”
Was he able to take in any air at that point?
“Not really,” Matheieu said.
Former Army soldier Daniel Roldan, the lead security officer at Ella Fitzgerald Middle, saw Matheieu come up to him with his hands on his throat and observed trouble in his eyes. He immediately asked for Richard Frank, a.k.a. Tank, with arms tattooed with John 3:16 and the 23rd Psalm, to intervene.
“And I just went full force,” said Frank, who began the Heimlich maneuver. “I went underneath his sternum, and then started, ‘boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And the sixth time, I felt and I heard him gasp for air, so I stopped. I was rubbing his chest, and I just said, ‘It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright.”
The grateful parents bonded with the heroes.
“Just hearing the swift actions of Officer Frank, hearing him saving our son, thanks is just never going to be enough,” said Matheieu’s mother, Rachel Cornelison, through tears.
Matheieu’s stepfather, Swade Cornelison, said that he’s “just glad that there’s still people in the world that are selfless.”
Saving a life is in sharp contrast to Frank’s previous profession.
“I worked in the cemetery business for 24 years, and I buried children that I knew,” Frank said. “And I wanted to make a difference in someone’s life, and in the kids’ lives. And I happened to become a security officer. And now I make a difference every day, not just in his life, but in the thousands of kids that I meet every day. I make a difference.”
Matheieu, at 12-years-old, said there will be no more kiwi for him.
To learn more about the Heimlich maneuver, including how to perform it, go here.