Detective reunited with boy he saved 12 years ago from near drowning in Severn
By Tim Tooten
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ODENTON, Maryland (WBAL) — Anne Arundel County police surprised a detective on Wednesday by reuniting him with a 12-year-old boy whose life he saved in 2011.
The long-awaited reunion was sparked by a social media post in which the grandmother noticed the detective as the person who saved her grandson’s life when he was 14 months old.
A lifetime of memories came rushing back into the mind of Lt. Walter Sweeney, who remembers the hot July day when he saved Matthew Henegar’s life. The boy, then an infant, nearly drowned after being pulled from a swimming pool on Evergreen Road in Severn.
“He was blue and his fingertips were blue and his lips were blue, and I gave him a couple of smacks on the back, and actually, before I could even start CPR, I gave him some chest compressions. Before I even got mouth to mouth, he started spitting up some of the water and breathing again, and the color started coming back,” Sweeney said.
Not long thereafter, they posed for a picture together — but hadn’t seen other since.
“They just told me that I fell in the pool and he gave me CPR, and after a couple of weeks, we went to go meet him. That’s all I heard,” Matthew said.
It’s a lifesaving story that Matthew’s mother, Carolyn Henegar, made sure he’s never going to forget.
“It means everything. Without him, I wouldn’t have him. We talk about it all the time, how grateful we are. We will always be grateful,” she said.
Matthew’s grandmother, Linda Henegar, reached out to the police department after seeing Sweeney’s recent promotion on a Facebook post.
“I posted a picture of him and Matthew, I posted this picture on the Facebook page. I said, ‘This is nice.’ I said, ‘Congratulations,'” Linda Henegar said.
The rest is history.
“I think it’s great to meet the guy that saved my life after 12 years,” Matthew said.
“It was exciting. A lot of emotion came back to how this happened, and that he was here and everything like that, it was very exciting,” Sweeney said.
It’s doubtful it will take another 11 or 12 years before the two will see each other again and add to an already amazing story.
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