An off-duty correction officer doing yard work yesterday heard a baby’s wail and sprang into action — scooping the injured child from the wreckage of a two-vehicle crash and then helping to rescue her parents and brothers.
Russell Simplice, 36, who works at Rikers Island, said he was raking leaves outside his home in Cambria Heights, Queens, around 1:30 p.m. when he heard the 2-year-old tot’s distressed cries about a block away at 225th Street and 118th Avenue.
Rushing to the scene, he saw the little girl trapped in a green van with Pennsylvania license plates along with her parents and two brothers, as the vehicle lay pinned sideways against a tree by a black Toyota Sequoia SUV.
With the help of two men who held open the back doors of the van, Simplice crawled in — finding the mom in the passenger seat with her head on the window and the father on the side of the car — both conscious and bleeding, he said.
The toddler was lying on the broken side window, crying and coughing up blood, he said.
“I felt this adrenaline rush and just ran in there and grabbed her,” he said. “A neighbor gave me a white towel to wrap her in, and I handed her to my wife. Then I went back in to help the parents.”
The two boys in the family, ages 10 and 12, were not injured and made it out on their own.
Simplice, a father of two, said he stayed with the shaken family until an ambulance arrived.
“I treated her as if she were my child,” he said of the little girl. “I did what any parent would have done.
“I was nervous, but my first reaction was to help. My only concern was to make sure that there wasn’t anyone trapped in the vehicle, and if they were, that they were fine.”
A total of four adults and two kids from both vehicles were rushed to Long Island Jewish and Jamaica hospitals.
Authorities said there were no serious or life-threatening injuries. Names of those involved in the crash — or what sparked the accident — were not immediately released.
Simplice said one of the young boys in the van later told him that his baby sister had been sitting on his mom’s lap when the crash occurred.
“I just hope she’s OK,” he said. “Child seats are very important. You might be in a rush and decide to just hold the child in your lap for a few blocks. But it only takes a second for your life to change.”
Additional reporting by John Doyle
