A father in Illinois received a surprise last week when a group of nurses came to his rescue — twice.
Darius Hinkle was arrested at the Touchette Regional Hospital in Centreville, Illinois after rushing his 1-year-old daughter Demani to the facility after she choked on a penny. Hinkle, who told KTVI-TV that he doesn't have a valid driver's license, had been going over 100 mph in an effort to reach the emergency room.
"The first thing in my mind was to get her to the hospital," Hinkle told KTVI.
According to Hinkle, multiple police officers from different departments chased him to the hospital and though he noticed, he didn't pull over until they reached the facility where his daughter could receive treatment.
"That's my daughter; I don't want nothing to happen to her," Hinkle said.
Donecia Pittman, Demani's mother, said the cops who followed them to the hospital instructed them to exit the vehicle and put their hands up. "I got out, put my hands up and yelled, and I told the police, 'My baby is choking.' And I told them multiple times that she was choking. They were just worried about the fact that we were speeding."
Demani received treatment at Touchette Regional Hospital while Hinkle was taken to jail.
Pittman told KTVI that she later went to the jail to bond Hinkle out, but met a nurse who said she was there to do the same.
"I was looking, like I didn't know who it was. And when I looked out the door to see who it was, she spoke, and she says, 'I'm the nurse from Touchette Hospital,'" Pittman said.
The amount of Hinkle's bond wasn't revealed, nor how many of the nurses chipped in to cover it. Touchette Hospital confirmed to KTVI that multiple nurses contributed to the total.
The couple said they couldn't thank the nurses enough for helping get Hinkle out of jail and also for their efforts to treat their daughter.
"They was there for us ever since we had got there," Pittman said.
It's not the first time that a parent has been detained on the way to a hospital. In 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Joel Arrona-Lara, a Mexican national, in California when he and his wife, Maria del Carmen Venegas, stopped to get gas on the way for Venegas' scheduled cesarean section to have the couple's son.
In 2017, a Louisiana couple was pulled over by police in Rapides Parish for speeding and the driver, Zak Evans, initial failure to stop when the officer flashed his lights and blasted his siren. Evans was taken to jail and missed the birth of his daughter though the officer later took him to the hospital after he was issued citations for speeding, flight from an officer and careless operation of a vehicle, KALB TV reported.
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