A pint-size hero: Girl, 6, calls 911 for mom
Published: March 12, 2007
Shy, at least around reporters, Barbie dolls and gymnastics practice make her big brown eyes shine.
But don’t be fooled. This first-grader from Enfield Street Elementary School has a lot of grownups beat when it comes to keeping cool under pressure. Just ask her grandmother.
“Chelcie, I heard you might be a hero,” her grandmother, Marcelle Deschaine, remembers telling her on the phone from Florida, where Marcelle, who lives in Enfield, is spending the winter.
“What’s a hero?” Chelcie asked.
“It’s someone who helps people who can’t help themselves,” Marcelle told her.
“Oh, I guess so,” Chelcie said, casually.
“She seemed so nonchalant about it,” Marcelle remembers. “She seemed to take it all in stride.”
On Thursday, curled up beside her mother on a couch at a relative’s home, Chelcie shows the only injury she suffered when a man accused of driving drunk T-boned her mother’s Buick Century on March 3 - a red scratch on her index finger.
Chelcie’s mother, Alyson Deschaine, 29, of Green Valley Drive, wasn’t so lucky, suffering eight broken ribs and a nasty cut on her head in the accident. But they were both lucky it wasn’t much worse, Alyson says.
Police say Michael Warzysky, 43, of 31 Quaker Lane, had a blood-alcohol rate of 2½ times the legal limit when he drove his pickup truck through a red light at the intersection of Phoenix Avenue and South Road, slamming headlong into Alyson’s car, pushing it into oncoming traffic.
It was 6:20 p.m., and Alyson was taking Chelcie out to dinner.
Instead of stopping, Warzysky tried to flee, until a quick-thinking motorist tailed him and flagged down officers, police said. Warzysky is facing charges of DUI, evading a motor vehicle accident, and failure to obey a traffic signal, police said.
Meanwhile, inside Alyson’s mangled sedan, mother and daughter were catching their breath.
“I said ‘Are you Ok?’ She said, ‘Yes,’” Alyson recalls. “She said, ‘Mom, are you OK?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I tried to turn around and look at her, and she said, ‘Mom, you’re bleeding, I need to call 911.’”
The impact of the collision had sent Alyson’s cell phone sailing from her purse to the floor.
Alyson, dazed, realized the car had come to rest in oncoming traffic. She was trying not to panic.
“I knew if I panicked, she would panic,” Alyson says.
Far from panicked, Chelcie was calm but insistent.
“I need to call 911,” Chelcie repeated.
The little girl unbuckled her seat belt in the back seat and scrambled to the front to grab the cell phone.
As witnesses gathered by the car to offer aid, Chelcie was already on the phone with dispatchers.
“She did it all herself. She was crying, but she was very brave,” Alyson says. “She answered all the questions, and stayed on the phone until the police came.”
Chelcie wasn’t the only one to call for help, but her calm determination helped her mother stay calm.
“I wanted my mom to get better,” Chelcie quietly recalls, as Nickelodeon plays on the television set.
She answers mostly in ‘yes’ and ‘no’s.’
Yes, she was scared. No, she doesn’t remember how she learned to call 911.
“We talked about it, remember?” her mother prompts. Chelcie nods.
No, the dispatchers didn’t ask very many questions. Well, they asked for her name, her mother’s name, and whether they had been wearing their seat belts.
Deputy Police Chief Anjo Timmerman said the girl’s composure rivals that of most grownups.
“A lot of adults who call us go into hysterics. To have someone this young stay calm is phenomenal,” Timmerman said
It’s a reminder to teach children about 911, he said.
Alyson says it’s a miracle Chelcie wasn’t badly hurt - she was seated right behind her in a booster seat in the back seat, on the side that got hit.
Chelcie is fidgeting impatiently, as if she’s had enough of being a hero for one day.
“Mommy, can I have a fruit snack?” She asks.
Alyson says that though she’s most proud of her little girl, she’s also grateful for the help offered by passersby - those who rushed to their aid, the man who followed Warzysky’s truck, and the emergency responders.
Warzysky, who is free on bond, is scheduled to appear in Superior Court today.
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