A Transportation Security Administration agent is being called a hero after he saved the life of a passenger at a New Jersey airport.
Robert Kennish went to work thinking it would be like any other day of routine security inspections for the TSA. However he would leave work that day as a hero.
Kennish, 36, was walking down the jet bridge inside Terminal A at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday night when he stumbled upon a chaotic scene where a passenger had collapsed and stopped breathing after her Virgin American flight had just arrived from San Francisco, NJ.com reports.
Kennish, of Metuchen, ran to the woman and performed an initial assessment. He quickly found that she had no pulse and she wasn't breathing. As a former federal marshal and EMT, Kennish knew how to handle the situation. He began performing CPR to try to resuscitate the woman.
Fortunately, there were other professional passengers at the scene as well. An opthalmologist and another passenger who was a nurse, jumped in to help Kennish as a flight attendant brought an automated external defibrillator.
After a few moments of performing CPR, Kennish felt the woman regain her pulse.
"Afterwards I couldn't believe it," Kennish, an 11-year veteran of the TSA, said in an interview according to NJ.com. "She had a strong pulse - I couldn't believe it."
The woman was with her husband at the time. Neither have been identified.
According to a TSA spokeswoman, the woman was taken to a nearby hospital by paramedics for continuous treatment.
Kennish doesn't take all the credit for the rescue. He says it was a group effort that led to the woman's revival, but his superiors acknowledged his role in saving the woman's life.
"Kennish demonstrated amazing personal courage and skill in emergency response," said Don Drummer, TSA's federal security director for the airport. "In all likelihood, Rob's decisive actions saved this passenger's life."
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