3-Year-Old Boy Saves Mother by Dialing 911

Michael Rodgers had no idea that the ambulance that passed him as he stood outside a newsstand Tuesday was headed for his Van Nuys condominium, where his wife was choking and on the verge of passing out.

But his 3-year-old son, Jameson, had known exactly what was happening and just what to do.

Jameson picked up a phone and called 911, just as his parents had trained him.

“My mom’s on the floor. She can’t breathe,” he told a Los Angeles City Fire Department dispatcher in a calm and articulate voice. “She can’t breathe. She can’t talk.”

Minutes later, three paramedics arrived from a station only a third of a mile away and found Peggy Rodgers on her hands and knees in a back room of the condominium, gasping for air. After two tries, they managed to dislodge a lozenge stuck in her throat, authorities said. She did not need to be hospitalized.

Jameson’s parents said they taught him how to call 911 about a year and a half ago when his mother was in the midst of a difficult pregnancy. They placed the phone within easy reach and had him practice making the call with the phone line unhooked, said Michael Rodgers--son of country-pop singer Jimmie S. Rodgers--who returned home to find his wife safe.

“I didn’t realize he had called 911 till I heard sirens,” the mother said at a news conference that Fire Department officials called to honor the boy. “He kept saying, ‘It’s OK, mom. They’re on their way. They’re on their way.’

“I think he’s a hero,” she said.

Fire Department officials agreed, saying Jameson’s training, quick thinking and tenacity saved his mother’s life after she choked on a lozenge as she watched television with the boy and his three-month-old sister, Michele, at about 1:45 p.m. Tuesday.

She said she was unable to breathe for at least three minutes, about two to three minutes less than the maximum amount of time before lack of oxygen causes brain damage, said Fire Capt. John Biggs, one of the rescuing firefighters.

The mother said she had taken the lozenge to fight a sore throat that kept her home from work. She said a medicinal spray numbed her throat, causing the lozenge to become stuck.

“I never thought for the whole time that I would die. I thought, ‘I’m not breathing.’ I never thought I wouldn’t see my kids again.”

At one point in the phone conversation, the mother got on another phone and gasped the words “I’m choking, I’m choking,” said Robert Sanchez, the Fire Department dispatcher who took the call.

Jameson, who will be 4 on Friday, said that although he sounded calm on the phone, he was frightened for his mother.

“When the paramedics were fixing her, I grabbed my teddy bear and I told myself, ‘Don’t bring my mom away like the ambulance does. Don’t take her away.’ ”