(Photo credit: Rockwall Independent School District)
Homecoming season is upon us. It doesn’t matter if you’re in high school, college or alumni, homecoming is one of these events that gets everyone excited. From the game to the tailgates, and all the parties, homecoming can be one big blurr. But the excitement of homecoming didn’t distract this one teenager from actually saving a life.
One minute Tyra Winters was celebrating homecoming at Rockwall High School in Texas. Then the next thing the popular teen knew, she was being called a hero. Tyra, 17, was riding on a parade float with the rest of the cheerleading squad and the school football team when she heard people saying that a child was choking below, per ABC News. Tyra looked out over the crowd and soon spotted the boy in question, a 2-year-old she later found out was named Clarke. Tyra leaped off the float, ran over to where Clarke was, and started doing the Heimlich maneuver, which her mother had taught her a few years back.
“I picked him up and then I tilted him downwards and gave him two or three back thrusts,” Winters says, noting Clarke’s face was first “super red,” then purple. CBS Dallas-Fort Worth reports Clarke had been gagging on a piece of candy. Clarke’s grateful mother had tried the Heimlich before Tyra bounded in from the sidelines, but it hadn’t worked.
(Photo credit: Rockwall ISD)
“I just literally was holding him out and just running through the crowd trying to hand him off to anyone,” Nicole Hornback says. “I literally ran from bystander to bystander, just trying to pass him off to whoever would take him…But I was so distraught, I couldn’t speak,” Hornback told NBC. “To feel so useless as a mother was the most terrifying thing in my life.”
“She saved my baby. I commend her for … being trained.” As for Clarke, he didn’t remember Tyra when the three reunited this week. “He doesn’t even remember what he ate for breakfast,” his mom tells ABC.
She said she tried to give him the Heimlich maneuver, but had never really learned how.
Winters was there in a flash and moments later, Clarke was breathing again.
“She saved my baby,” said Hornback. “I commend her for being a teenager and being trained.”
Now, the community is calling Winters a hero for her lifesaving act.
“I was driving the fire truck in the parade that day and exited the vehicle to… render aid after seeing the look of panic on the mom’s face, but before I could reach the little boy, Tyra had flipped him over and administered back blows in textbook fashion,” one community member shared on Rockwall Independent School District’s Facebook post. “I have been a paramedic for 20 years and [I’m] not sure that I have ever seen such quick, lifesaving action. My deepest respect for you Tyra!”
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