Retired EMT, mom of late firefighter attend New York City graduation of baby saved in 1998
GRAVESEND, Brooklyn (WABC) -- A retired FDNY EMT and the mother of a fallen firefighter were on hand at a special graduation in Brooklyn Wednesday, as a baby who needed to be resuscitated at birth received her diploma.
"I took her out, she was the size of my hand," former FDNY EMT Vivian Lomacang said. "She was blue, and she wasn't breathing."
Amari Jamison was so fragile when she was born three months prematurely that EMTs wrapped her in foil to keep her warm.
"I sat in my tub, and then I had just, like, one sharp pain," mom Devin Jamison said. "Once I pushed, I felt her head...When I made a second push, she came out. So James and Vivian seen that. I was just relieved because the pain stopped."
Jimmy Coyle was just an EMT then, but he would go on to become a firefighter and tragically die on 9/11 when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
"My son came home and told me he had delivered a baby," mom Regina Coyle said. "He had been scared to death. But Vivian talked him through everything. Vivian was kind of like his EMT mom."
Coyle and Lomacang teamed up back in 1998 to save Amari Jamison in her mother's Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment.
"From a distance, I started massaging her chest and started giving her puffs of air," Lomacang said. "I didn't want to blow too hard, because I would have blew her lungs out."
Now, Amari Jamison is 21 years old and a graduate from a vocational program for students with special needs at the Brooklyn Occupational Training Center in Gravesend -- with two honorary aunts who love her as much as her biological family.
Not only did Lomacang and Coyle visit her regularly in the NICU, the two families have been a part of her life ever since.
"It was a memorable job," Lomacang said. "I had to find out what happened to this baby."
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