Hero cop's assurance
'Injured tot will be OK'
The hero NYPD cop caught on video clutching the 4-year-old Times Square shooting victim shared a Mother’s Day message to the little girl’s mom: “She’ll be OK.”
Officer Alyssa Vogel offered words of comfort Sunday to Skye Martinez’s mother Sonia Romero — a day after the woman watched her baby take a bullet to the leg during a trip to the tourist mecca.
“Keep your head up,” Vogel told The Post when asked if she had a message for the injured tot’s mom. “The little girl’s going to be able to walk again. She’ll be OK.”
Vogel was caught on dramatic surveillance footage bolting down Broadway with Skye in her arms after gunfire broke out before 5 p.m. Saturday. The girl, the youngest of three victims, was shot in the leg.
The officer — mom of a 6-month-old boy — recalled reassuring Skye’s mother in the moments after the shooting.
“I kept telling her to breathe, that I know what she’s going through because I have a baby myself,” said Vogel. “It was very difficult for her, very traumatic. She saw her daughter just get shot.
“I kept telling her to breathe and that her daughter was going to be OK,” she added. “I kept trying to calm her down because she was obviously very scared.”
Vogel, a former schoolteacher who joined the NYPD 4¹/2 years ago, also said the tiny shooting victim was “the strongest little girl I’ve ever seen.”
“This little girl was so strong,” recalled the cop, who is stationed at the Midtown North Precinct. “She didn’t even cry once except when we were putting the tourniquet on. She screamed because it’s very painful.
“I just picked her up so I could run to the ambulance,” she said. “She was just saying she wanted her mom. Her mom was running right behind me, but she was calling for her mother.”
At Bellevue
Hospital,
Vogel’s maternal instincts kicked in, compelling her to look after the girl until she was in doctors’ hands.
“I actually got out of the ambulance with her and ran her to the pediatrics unit, where the doctors took over,” she said. Skye is expected to make a full recovery. Reached by phone Sunday, Romero declined to comment.