Officer resuscitates 5-year-old girl

Rosa Limon pulled a gob of chewed noodles from her daughter’s breathless body, but the 5-year-old’s lips kept turning purple. She still wasn’t breathing.

Moments before, her daughter, Alexia, frolicked joyfully in an inflatable bounce house at a birthday party in Huntington Beach. But she still had a mouthful of food, which apparently became lodged in her throat.

She vomited and stopped breathing, Rosa Limon said.

Soon after an emergency call was made at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Officers Shawn Randell and Jennifer Marlatt found the young girl on the grass in front of the apartment complex where the party was taking place. Randell gave the child “mouth-to-mouth” resuscitation, noticing a racing heart rate and her lips turning blue, police said.

Alexia began breathing on her own in less than a minute, Limon said. She was taken to the hospital overnight and released the next day, Lt. Craig Junginger said.

“She almost died,” Rosa Limon said. “They saved my daughter’s life. The police did a very good job.”

Alexia is healthy and at home in Anaheim with her family. “She’s tired, just normalizing right now,” Limon said.

Randell has made a lot of headlines over the last few months. He’s one of the two officers involved in the fatal shooting of Ashley MacDonald in August that touched off protests and a firestorm of criticism. He came back to full duty only a few days after the controversial shooting in Sun View Park, Chief Ken Small said.

“He’s been under a tremendous amount of stress due to the media attention,” Small said.

Most notably in the last few weeks, since the officers’ names were released to the public, news reports suggesting that county prosecutors are more likely to file criminal charges against Randell and Officer Read Parker, than not, have really bothered Randell, Small said.

“In spite of that, he continues to come to work,” Small said. “He does an outstanding job, the most recent example being Sunday’s incident.”

Limon had not known about the officer who saved her daughter being involved in the August shooting, but said she did not care.

Their family is happy and whole because of what Randell did, Limon said.

“I don’t care if he was in trouble or not,” Limon said.

“I am just very happy because he saved my daughter’s life. He saved her life. That is the only thing that matters.”