'Eternally Grateful': San Bernardino Deputy Saves 10-Day-Old Girl

RANCHO CUCAMONGA (CBSLA) — Twins Abigail and Victoria are just shy of one month old and are the apple of their father's eye.

"My dad died before I was born," Glen Wood, their father, said. "My whole life I've dreamed about kind of being the dad I never had."

But a couple of weeks ago, when Victoria was just 10 days old, Wood's dream took a dark turn.

"She had finished eating formula, and then she gagged," he said.

Little Victoria had choked on her formula and stopped breathing.

"We tried to get it out," Wood said. "We suctioned it out, and still she wasn't breathing properly."

So he did the only thing he could think of and called 911.

"He kind of gave me that look like, 'Do you know what you're doing,'" Deputy Joshua Kelly said.

Kelly, a deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, was the first to respond to Wood's call. And while he looks young, he too is a dad.

"I know what was going on," he said. "I flipped her over, threw her on my arm, and started doing back thrusts. So I did back thrusts for about 30 seconds, flipped her over to check her breathing. There was still nothing."

So he performed two rounds of chest compressions.

"After about a minute and a half, the baby's arms just dropped and went lifeless," she said. "So I thought for sure the baby, we lost the baby."

But Kelly was not about to give up on Victoria and continued chest compressions. After about three minutes, she finally spit up the formula.

"That's when she took that first breath in and it's almost like in that three minutes I made a connection with that baby and I was there for its first breath," Kelly said. "Like that's how it felt to me."

Wood said he wanted to share the story because he wanted the public to see this side of law enforcement.

"He really had his heart in it," Wood said. "I'm just eternally grateful."

For Kelly, doing everything he could to keep Victoria safe was all in a day's work.

"Some people see what we do, some people don't," he said. "It's not just arresting people. There's a lot more to it."