When Jessie Ferreira Cavallo saw a suicidal boy plunge off an overpass bridge she knew immediately, she had to jump into action. The New York police officer said she parked her car, gathered first aid supplies, and jumped 30 feet after him.
“Everything happened so fast and I think my adrenaline was pumping so high,” the officer said. “All I saw was blood down there. He landed head first. I didn’t realize how high it was. It seemed doable. It didn’t seem that high. I thought I jumped over a brick wall, or a cement barrier. It was more like tunnel vision. I saw the boy and I needed to get to him. I didn’t see anything else.” Cavallo, along with a bystander who was wearing a military uniform, placed a neck brace and splint on the 12-year-old boy, who was unresponsive at the time.
"I think I was here at that time for a reason," Ferreira Cavallo said. "I think it was God's plan, that he knew that I was actually going to jump off and help."
The boy is currently recovering at the hospital, and the 28-year-old said she wasn’t allowed to visit him. “I really want to know how he is doing. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know his name or anything,” Cavallo says. “I just want to give him a hug.”
This is now the 6th person she's saved. A few years ago, while working for Mount Vernon police, she saved an elderly man after a heart attack by using a defibrillator and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and she also received 4 awards in Hastings for saving people who had heroin overdoses.
All this recognition may ruin her part time job as an undercover agent for the FBI!