Faith guides Fort Worth police officers who saved baby after crash
Fort Worth police officers who rescued an infant from an overturned car say prayer and faith guided them through the tense moments.
Sgt. Ryan Nichols and Officer Edwin Bounds were on duty about 9:30 a.m. when a car rolled in front of them on Interstate 30 between Eastchase Parkway and Cooks Lane. “The accident happened directly in front of me. I watched the rollover,” Bounds said.
At a press conference on Tuesday, the two men in uniform stood in front of a projector displaying a body-camera video that captured how they rescued a 1-year-old baby girl pinned under a car, tears filling their eyes as they watched.
The footage from the Oct. 23 accident shows the officers sprinting toward an overturned car as bystanders try to help. One officer crawls underneath to reach the limp infant and pulls her out. “She has a pulse,” one of the officers says as they immediately start CPR, pressing her tiny chest.
“Keep going, Mama,” Bounds says in the video as the baby makes faint noises and later cries. By 9:40 a.m., on the camera timestamp, medics arrive and rush her into the ambulance, as seen in the video.
“We thought she was dead. But we’re not going to sit there and just do nothing. So we began to work, just praying on the inside that the Lord was going to just work the problem for us,” Nichols said.
“When we first pulled her out and turned her on her side, my first thought was to reach into her mouth and just pull out any kind of grass or dirt or anything that could get lost in her airway to make sure that she can breathe,” Bounds said.
“If you have any kind of training, you try to fall back on it. You don’t remember everything — you just try to do something that works and keep going,” Nichols said. “That baby breathed and everybody else on that scene was able to take a breath.”
“That was the first glimmer of hope that I saw, and maybe the first time that I was actually able to take a breath for myself,” Bounds added. He said he could not sleep that night because he was thinking about the baby, and he went to Cook Children’s Medical Center the next morning to check on her.
Community members stepped up
Sgt. Nichols and Officer Bounds, both dads to three children and who have been in law enforcement for almost two decades, said more than 20 community members in the area of the crash stopped by to help.
Every person on scene was trying to figure out how they could help, and “they just stepped up and got it done,” Nichols said.
Bounds said, “I want people to realize that there are good people in this world, and the video shows it.”
“Faith drives every decision we do or don’t make out here, drives how we treat people, the love we try to show the community,” Nichols added.
Police Chief Eddie Garcia said, “I remember watching the bodycam video myself, and I got emotional.”
The actions of the two officers are “the representation of the hearts of not only police officers in Fort Worth but across the state of Texas and in this country, and far too often, these good deeds go unnoticed,” Garcia said.
“At the end of the day, we are dads, we are moms, we are brothers, we are sisters,” Garcia said. “You know, people talk about how they were able to move the car and everything — these guys used dad strength; and whether it’s dad strength or mom strength, whatever you’ve got, they treated that baby as if it was their own.”
The infant was taken by ambulance to a local hospital, and is doing well, according to police. Both she and her mother are expected to fully recover.
This story was originally published October 28, 2025 at 6:49 PM.