RIVER TRAGEDY
Baby found floating under Brooklyn Bridge
An 8-month-old boy’s lifeless body washed up under the Brooklyn Bridge in lower Manhattan Sunday afternoon — his parents nowhere to be found, police said.
Police and a nearby tourist tried desperately to revive the tot just after 4 p.m., but their efforts couldn’t save the little boy’s life.
Austin Campbell, 19, said he spotted the baby in the water near South and Dover Sts.
“My mom had seen it, and he was just floating face up in the water. She called my dad over and we all came over and said there’s a baby over there,” said Campbell, an Oklahoma resident vacationing in Manhattan with his family.
“We were trying to see if it was a real baby, it looked kind of like a doll. We didn’t know if anyone had actually thrown a baby in there. My dad hopped in, pulled the baby out and started to do CPR on it,” he said.
“(My father) said that there was no pulse, its lips were a little blue. The way it seemed it hadn’t been in there very yg long.”
The boy was dressed in nothing but a diaper.
A passerby flagged down two cops assigned to the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, police said.
One of the cops climbed a safety railing and brought the tot to a pedestrian walkway, where the officers performed CPR until an ambulance arrived .
Medics rushed the boy to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Lower Manhattan, but he couldn’t be saved.
The baby’s body showed no sign of trauma, cops said. It wasn’t immediately clear how long he had been in the water.
“It just doesn’t seem real. I don’t know, I didn’t expect this when I came here,” Campbell said. “I’m from Oklahoma, we’re from a small town with like 60,000 people … . It’s just unreal, you don’t come to the city expecting to see things like this, to see babies floating in the water.”
Detectives were still looking into how the boy wound up in the water, and the whereabouts of his parents.
The city medical examiner’s office will determine the boy’s cause of death.