He collapsed in the middle of EDC with a 109 core body temp. These officers saved his life.
Three Las Vegas police officers were recognized Tuesday for saving the life of a man who collapsed with a core body temperature of 109 degrees at the Electric Daisy Carnival.
Sgt. Mark Menzie and officers Cody Bonner and Leon Chavez received a Lifesaving Award from Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo during a special ceremony Tuesday.
“Knowing he survived because of us using our tactics and our training, it is rewarding,” Chavez said.
The officers were working the three-day festival at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway at 2 a.m. Oct. 23 when they came across the unconscious man on the ground among the crowd.
“We tried to revive him, and literally he was surrounded by a wall of people,” Menzie said. “We tried to revive him, he’s not responding, we are not seeing much breathing. He was in a bad position. We called for medical. There was no medical transport available for this guy. He is not responding at all to us.”
The trio knew they had to get the man out of the crowd if he was going to have a chance at survival. Bonner and Chavez picked the man up and put him on their shoulders while Menzie served as a human bulldozer, charging ahead of his fellow officers to create a path through all the people.
“We knew the direction we had to go,” Menzie said. “These guys did the heavy lifting. I was doing the elbows and everything else, not-too-polite shoves, get out of the way to the left and right, and it was pretty much a fight all the way to the main medical facility.”
It took the officers more than seven minutes to traverse more than 400 yards to the medical facility.
“I grabbed his feet, he grabbed his body, we slung him over and we just started through the crowd,” Chavez recalled.
The man’s core body temperature was measured at a remarkable 109 degrees in what was believed to be a drug overdose.
His condition was so unstable that he couldn’t be transported to the hospital until his temperature lowered, Menzie said.
Medical personnel created a large ice bath and dunked the man in it until his temperature dropped to 104 degrees.
At that point, he was taken to the hospital.
The officers learned days later that the man had survived and made a full recovery. They haven’t yet had a chance to talk to him.
Bonner said the rescue happened well into a 12-hour shift when all of the officers were already exhausted, but he’s thankful for the experience.
“A long night,” Bonner said. “I was just trying to get to a point where I could relax after that. It was tunnel vision.”
Contact Glenn Puit by email at gpuit@reviewjournal.com. Follow @GlennatRJ on Twitter.