Saviors Under Cover

Karina Vargas had barely hung up with a 911 operator after noticing her infant son had stopped breathing, when two long-haired men in matching blue work shirts burst into her apartment. They gingerly lifted the motionless 2-month-old from her arms and went to work.

The men were burly and quiet and absent any medical supplies, and Vargas knew they were not paramedics. But she and the half-dozen neighbors who had rushed in to help didn’t question their motives as the pair knelt by Vargas’ bed and began life-saving procedures on the tiny baby.

“She was so frantic, and I was so scared,” Armando Lugo, the boy’s father, recalled Wednesday. “We weren’t thinking straight. . . . We just let [the men] take over.”

Added Vargas: “I thought for sure he was dead.”

But after receiving a series of short breaths and gentle compressions to his fist-sized chest, little Jesse Lugo’s eyes opened and he gasped hungrily for air. The baby, born three months premature, was suffering from a respiratory infection that caused him to stop breathing during a nap Tuesday afternoon.

It wasn’t until Jesse was safely hooked up to a ventilator at a nearby hospital that the parents learned who the mystery rescuers were: undercover Anaheim police officers who happened to be on a surveillance operation a block away when they heard the emergency call and decided it couldn’t wait.

Detectives Robert Brown and Robert Wardle screeched up to the apartment on West Fay Lane before the dispatcher on the radio even finished talking. They raced up the stairs and barged inside. Vargas was just hanging up the telephone.

“It was chaos in there,” said Brown, a 25-year veteran with the department. “People were yelling, crying, running all over.”

The detectives said they remember telling someone they were police officers, but they said that because of the pandemonium they weren’t sure if anyone really understood.

“We just looked at that limp little baby and knew we had to do something quick,” Wardle said.

Jesse’s parents--using pictures on a cardiopulmonary resuscitation instruction sheet--had tried unsuccessfully to revive him before the officers arrived. Under Brown’s coaching, Wardle, a 10-year police veteran, began CPR again.

Neither had performed the technique on an infant, they said, and getting Jesse to breathe proved more stressful to the detectives than most undercover operations.

“I’m sitting there pushing on his tiny chest with my two fingers thinking, ‘How hard do I push?’ and [Wardle is] sitting there going, ‘Little puffs of air, don’t breathe too hard into his mouth,’ ” Brown recalled. “I’m going, ‘Don’t push too hard,’ and he’s saying, ‘Don’t breathe too hard,’ and the whole time we’re both going, ‘Where the hell’s the ambulance?’ ”

Finally, after Jesse began breathing, two paramedics arrived at the apartment and whisked the baby in a police car to Anaheim Memorial Hospital. The baby was later transferred to Children’s Hospital of Orange County, where he will probably remain several more days, officials said. He was listed in stable condition late Wednesday.

His parents, watching Jesse’s chest move up and down in a ventilator crib, said they will never forget the disheveled officers, dressed like repairmen, who arrived in their lives at precisely the right moment.

“If they weren’t there, I don’t know what we would have done,” Vargas said. “We are so grateful they were so close and came so fast. They saved our baby’s life.”

The detectives, however, refuse to take all of the credit.

“Someone put us there for a reason,” Brown said. “It wasn’t that kid’s time to go.”