The American Red Cross has conferred one of its highest distinctions to a teenager after he used a defibrillator to help resuscitate a man who had collapsed on a golf course amid a medical emergency that otherwise likely would have killed him.
Hudson Mobley, 17, was directly responsible for the fact that the man whom he aided that day was still living, according to officials who honored him recently during a rally at his New Orleans-area high school.
“I’m very grateful for all the awards – I’m grateful for everything but most of all I’m grateful … the guy survived,” Mobley said to CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana and other local news outlets. “That’s really the best thing you could wish for, you know?”
Mobley was working at Chateau Golf and Country Club in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner last October when he spotted a crowd gathered at the driving range. He jumped out of the golf cart he was riding, approached and realized a man had lost consciousness from suffering cardiac arrest.
As he recounted, Mobley made sure someone had called emergency responders and began performing chest compression on the fallen man. A bystander soon appeared with an automated external defibrillator, a portable device that can be used to treat a person whose heart has suddenly stopped beating.
Mobley had familiarized himself with how to handle that machine – which can administer electrical shocks if necessary – as part of two Red Cross classes that he took separately as part of his training to become a lifeguard. And he used it that fateful day, buying the unconscious man valuable time.
First responders soon arrived and brought the man to a nearby hospital. Local firefighters who were among those to respond to Chateau that day later wrote on Facebook that the stricken man was “alive because of Hudson’s heroic act”.
The chief executive of Louisiana’s Red Cross chapter, Kenneth St Charles, reiterated that claim at the rally held by Mobley’s school, Haynes Academy for Advanced Studies.
“Hudson saved this man’s life,” said St Charles, whose nonprofit organization is dedicated to providing emergency and disaster relief. “He knew how to set [the defibrillator] up, he knew what he needed to do with the victim’s chest to get ready for the shock [and] he administered those shocks.”
St Charles soon handed Mobley a certificate of merit signed by Joe Biden, who had been in New Orleans a couple of days before the rally.
After receiving the president’s certificate, Mobley told reporters that he remembered how he sat on a curb and began crying as an ambulance took away the man whom he had rescued. One of the first responders asked Mobley if he was OK while commending the teen for the job he had done.
“I didn’t really think about much until I was actually doing this – then it clicked with me: ‘Hey, I’m right in the middle of this,’” Mobley said, according to WWL. “It got pretty scary.”
