The heroic EMT who helped keep a pregnant gunshot victim alive long enough for doctors to deliver her child said yesterday that he wants to see the “miracle baby.”
“I believe this baby is a blessing from God,” said Anthony Sligh, the emergency medical technician.
Sligh said he was relieved to hear yesterday that the baby was in stable condition, but he was also angry the boy’s mother was senselessly gunned down. “I’d like to be able to see the baby, the miracle baby,” said Sligh. “I’m told the baby is doing better, and each day increases his chances of survival.”
Sligh, 40, was watching the gang movie “New Jack City” at his mother’s apartment at the Wyckoff Gardens housing project in Gowanus, Brooklyn, when just before 1 a.m. Saturday he heard real gunfire. He ran to a window and heard someone scream, “She’s shot!”
Sligh grabbed his medical bag and rushed to the 71/2 months pregnant Nicole Sutton, a bystander shot in the neck by a stray bullet as she sat on a bench in front of her building.
“She wasn’t breathing, but I did detect a faint pulse,” said Sligh.
Sligh put a bag-valve mask over her face to pump air into Sutton’s lungs, but her pulse stopped and she went into cardiac arrest.
“Somebody yelled, ‘She’s pregnant,’ and we just tried that much harder,” said Sligh, who directed a female cop to help him do chest compressions on the 33-year-old victim.
When paramedics got there, Sligh and the cop had revived Sutton. She was taken to Long Island College Hospital, where doctors performed a Caesarean section to deliver a 2-pound boy. Sutton died at 1:09 a.m.
“That baby is now going to survive, but he’s going to grow up without a mom,” said Sligh, a godfather of five who is studying to be a full paramedic at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
No arrests have been made.
Sutton’s uncle Doug Spain said the family is considering calling the baby Nicholas Miracle after his mother. “He’s fighting,” Spain said of the child.
With Tanyanika Samuels
