Choke tragedy
Girl, 7, on life support after accident
a 7-YEar-oLd Queens girl is on life support after she choked on a dorito chip while pretending to hang herself as part of a prank she was playing on her mother, authorities said Thursday.
Precise Tucker tied a bathrobe belt around her neck and fastened the other end to a refrigerator handle wednesday at 8:30 p.m., then pretended to choke, police said.
Precise has a reputation for being a prankster, and her mom, Purity Baldwin, told her to stop playing around, then stepped out of the kitchen and left the girl on her own, cops said.
That’s when Precise started snacking on chips, and started to choke for real, cops said.
Her 15-year-old brother saw her in distress and ran out of their astoria apartment to get help.
He banged on the door of debi Pawluk, a former EMT, yelling, “Come! Come! There’s something wrong with my sister!”
Pawluk said she stuck her fingers down Precise’s mouth to clear out her throat, while a neighbor, John Tziastoudias, helped. “Her mother was already doing CPr before I got there,” she said.
Precise was eating doritos, and looking up a video on YouTube when she choked, Pawluk said.
“I got the chip out of her mouth. She threw up. I cleared the ventway so I can do the CPr,” Pawluk said.
Pawluk said the bathrobe likely had nothing to do with why she choked.
“That was a prank. The thing was loose,” she said. “The brother cut it off. There’s absolutely no marks whatsoever on this girl’s neck.”
Pawluk added, “She’s just a prankster. She was pranking and she was doing a thing on YouTube.”
Medics brought in a device to suction Precise’s mouth, then intubated her and took her to Elmhurst Hospital Center, Tziastoudias said.
Precise was transferred to Long Island Jewish Cohen Children’s Medical Center.
“If anybody deserved a miracle, it would be this family. we watched these kids grow up and for something like that to happen is terrible,” Tziastoudias said. Precise’s father coaches football, and her mom works for Con Ed, he said.
“They just had a new baby, a baby sister,” Tziastoudias said. “It was not her (Baldwin’s) fault at all, but accidents happen and it was terrible, and I would have never expected it to happen in this building.”