Crime scene investigator Theresa Bingham was driving back to CCSO from a burglary scene in Immokalee on April 9 when a call came over her in-car radio about a child locked inside a car.Bingham was only a few minutes away on Lake Trafford Road. She radioed the sergeant on duty.
“Do you mind if I go?’ asked Bingham, who had never responded to a rescue call in her nine years as a CSI.
“Of course not,” the sergeant replied, giving her the OK.
When Bingham arrived at 9200 Poole Lane she found a 6-month-old baby who had been locked inside a car for five minutes. The child was crying and sweating profusely, while the mother was trying to smash one of the car windows with a hammer to no avail.
“(The mother) was really tiny and she was having trouble with the hammer,” Bingham said. “I told her to smash it really hard.”
With Bingham coaching her, the mother managed to break the window. Bingham then reached in and unlocked the door.
“I said is the air on inside the house and she said yes. I said help me get the child’s clothes off,” recalled Bingham.
Once inside the air-conditioned trailer, Bingham got a cold wash cloth and began rubbing it on the baby’s head, chest and stomach until the child’s temperature returned to normal.
“By the time EMS got there I had the baby laughing,” said Bingham,
It wasn’t the first time Bingham, a 44-year-old CPR instructor and former volunteer firefighter, came to the aid of a child in distress.
Bingham, who has been with CCSO since 1987, saved a drowning child while working as an emergency dispatcher.
Her CSI colleagues are proud of her recent rescue.
“They thought it was pretty cool,’’ she said.
