The Greatest Gift of All : Rescue: Officer hears 911 call on Christmas Day and races to apartment, where he revives a choking 19-month-old girl.

It was the best Christmas gift that Marcos and Martha Reyes had ever received.

“I want to thank the (sheriff’s) sergeant for saving my daughter’s life,” Marcos Reyes, 26, said Thursday. “He can have anything I have. I owe him that much and more.”

On Christmas evening, Orange County Sheriff’s Sgt. Russell Moore saved the couple’s 19-month-old daughter, Jessica, by dislodging a piece of food stuck in her throat.

The family had been to a Christmas party at a nearby apartment. When they returned about 8:15 p.m., Martha, 25, filled a bowl of dry cereal for Jessica.

Minutes later they discovered Jessica had stopped breathing.

“She was very quiet, and then she started to move her head wildly from side to side,” Reyes said. “My wife took Jessica in her arms, and I ran to the telephone to call 911.”

In the confusion, Reyes said he first spoke in Spanish and then English describing the situation as best he could to the emergency dispatcher. Precious seconds ticked away.

“I didn’t know what to do. Usually I’m in control,” Reyes said, as he bounced Jessica in his arms. “I told them: ‘Somebody please send an ambulance. My baby is dying.’ ”

As luck would have it, Moore, 41, was less than a block away but out of his patrol car. Normally, he would not have heard the first-aid call that goes to the Fire Department’s paramedics, but a fast-thinking police dispatcher, Gwen Loverink,overheard the call and broadcast it to deputies.

“When I heard the call over my radio, I was in the home of a family who happened to be related to Marcos Reyes,” Moore said. “And, when I heard the address, I immediately knew where it was. It was the same apartment that I had lived in when I was a Marine and had first moved into San Clemente more than 20 years ago!”

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Moore, accompanied by a member of that family who was asked to help with interpreting, hopped into his car and raced to the Reyes’ apartment.

“When I got there, you could hear people screaming inside the apartment,” Moore recalled. “The mother handed me the baby, whose finger tips and lips were now blue.”

Moore first pressed on the baby’s diaphragm, without result. Then he turned her on her stomach and tapped her back several times. Still no luck. But after a few more tries, a big kernel of cereal popped out.

But Jessica was not breathing.

“I started breathing into her mouth several times and just kept doing that,” Moore said.

When paramedics arrived, Moore had gone to meet them in front of the apartment. As paramedics went to attach an oxygen mask, Jessica emitted two gasping “whoops” and took her first breath as she started crying loudly, Moore said.

The girl was taken to Samaritan Medical Center in San Clemente, where doctors diagnosed that she had a high temperature and virus and, as a result, had suffered a seizure while eating. She was released later to her parents.

Since the incident, Reyes, who is a manager of a fast-food restaurant in San Clemente, has refused to take money from any sheriff’s deputy who drops in for food.

“We’re going to have Moore tell him to stop doing that,” Lt. Tom Davis said. “As deputies, we cannot accept any free food or gratuities, and although he means well, he’s going to get us in trouble.”