2018 NJSPBA Valor Awards
Preventing a suicide
Buyer’s remorse befell a man who had
sliced both of his wrists on Oct. 22, 2017,
leading him to call 911. Upon arrival,
Point Pleasant Borough Local 158 Pres-
ident Brian Fennessy found the victim
looking pale, with blood spurting from
one of his arms. “He says, ‘I’m really sor-
ry’ and ‘I’m starting to feel really dizzy,’”
Fennessy recalls. “We sat him down and
there was blood squirting, like in a movie
scene.”
Fennessy, an 18-year law enforcement
veteran and EMT, went into his personal
trauma kit and applied a tourniquet to the
arm that was bleeding heavily and a pres-
sure bandage to the other. After five min-
utes, officers were able to calm the victim
down and have him sit. “He tells us his
hand is going numb,” Fennessy relates. “I
say, ‘That’s the tourniquet — it’s supposed
to feel numb.’”
The victim, who had been sitting for-
ward in his chair, then leaned back and
took a deep breath. “All of a sudden, we
saw bubbles coming out of his chest,”
Fennessy expresses. “Earlier, we heard
him say he ‘got himself in the chest,’ but
we were so concerned with the blood
coming from his arms that we didn’t see
that he had taken an 8-inch carving knife
from the kitchen and stabbed himself
right in the chest. He missed his heart
but hit his lung, so every time he took a
breath, air would come out and go back
in.”
At that moment, Fennessy ran to his
car and grabbed a seal for sucking chest
wounds. “We put that on and that got him
back up to breathe,” he explains.
A few minutes later, the paramedics
Lifesaving Award
Police Offi cer Brian Fennessy
Point Pleasant Borough Local 158
showed up. All bleeding was under con-
trol when they arrived, so they took the
victim to the trauma center, where he
underwent surgery and made a full recov-
ery. “Other than someone who actually
succeeded in killing himself, that was the
most blood I’ve seen,” Fennessy states.
“Really, it’s a gruesome story with a happy
ending.”
Lifesaving Award
Offi cer Jose Morales
Offi cer Russell Post
Sussex County Local 138
Experience and teamwork
save the day in apartment fi re
When Officer Russell Post became a
Sussex County Local 138 member three
years ago, he expected to protect and
serve like every other officer. What he
didn’t expect was to be partnered with
a 25-year veteran, Officer Jose Morales.
Luckily, age turned out to be just a num-
ber.
On Jan. 27, as the two officers exited
the Newton Police Department, they were
dispatched to a fire at an apartment build-
ing. While Post and Morales were able to
enter on the first floor, they couldn’t reach
the building’s second floor, where resi-
dents were trapped.
The second-floor apartment residents
were able to make it out to their balcony,
where Post and Morales instructed them
to climb off so that they could land safely
on their patrol car. From there, Post and
Morales assisted the residents down from
the vehicle to safety.
For their actions, both officers were
honored with the lifesaving award at the
PBA Valor Awards on Nov. 17.
This wasn’t the pair’s first award; the
officers also were honored by Emergency
Medical Services of Sussex County.
As a young officer, Post sums up the
recognition as “an amazing experience.”
While the two officers may only have
been partners for a year, Post recounts
how much he has learned from Morales
in that short period of time. “He [Morales]
was on the Hoboken SWAT Team [before
becoming a member of Local 138], so
we’ve gone over a lot of SWAT tactics that
I probably never would’ve known about.”
Although Morales may be the more ex-
perienced officer of the two, that doesn’t
diminish how impressed he was with
Post’s instincts on the day of the fire. “It’s
rare to come across a young police officer
that has this instinct of strength, knowl-
edge, wisdom and courage,” Morales
praises. “To go into a burning building as
a police officer is not something you typ-
ically do, but with the amount of experi-
ence that he had to perform, at the level
he performed, I was honored to have him
as my partner that day.”
www.njcopsmagazine.com
■ DECEMBER 2018 63