Karen Ressegieu woke up early last Saturday so she could finish making a cake and cupcakes for a funeral luncheon she and her husband Jim were attending that morning. But when she went to wake Jim, he was unresponsive. Karen called 911 and four La Vista Nebraska Police officers responded.
After multiple attempts to revive Jim failed, paramedics declared the 78-year-old deceased. Despite having just lost her husband of 56 years, Karen couldn’t stop worrying about the cakes she still needed to finish. La Vista Officer John Danderand was struck by her selflessness. "She had a lot going on, she had some neighbors stopping by trying to figure things out, get information from her,” he recalls. “And she had mentioned about three times that she had to get a cake frosted, they were supposed to attend a funeral that morning.”
So Danderand stopped what he was doing and helped Karen finish frosting her cakes. Sergeant Kraig Gomon snapped a couple of pictures of the moment that the department posted on social media. The post has received hundreds of comments and likes with most praising the officer for his kindness. But Gomon says it was Karen’s selflessness that inspired the act. “It was a small gesture for us to be able to try to return that to her," Gomon says. And after all that she’d been through, Karen just couldn’t stop being concerned for others and promised to make a cake for the officers. "They didn't get to taste that cake, so I've got to make another cake and just bring it over there to them," she says.