The Buffalo News
By Stephen T. Watson
BUFFALO, NY — On Mother’s Day 1996, on Delishia Yantin’s first birthday, a 911 dispatcher helped save the little girl’s life as she choked on a cookie.
Her mother was, and remains, very grateful, but she lost touch with that calm dispatcher from 14 years ago.
So this year, Viviana Colondres wanted to find that man and invite him to Delishia’s “sweet 15" party.
Fate intervened on Ash Wednesday, when the dispatcher — now a Lackawanna fire lieutenant — responded to an emergency at St. Anthony’s Church in Lackawanna and walked into an unexpected reunion.
Colondres was stunned to see Ken Drozdowski enter the church, and he saw Delishia for the first time in 14 years.
They closed the circle Saturday, at Delishia’s Quinceanera, when a girl who is grateful for the chance to grow up celebrated with the man driven to save lives by a personal loss.
“I feel really happy to spend this day with all the people I care about, and especially both of the persons who saved me 14 years ago. Because if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be here,” said Delishia, referring to Drozdowski and her godmother, Wanda Rivera, who was on the phone with him during those tense moments.
The story begins on May 12, 1996, which was Mother’s Day, Delishia’s first birthday and the day of her baptism.
After church, Colondres was getting her former Ingham Avenue home ready for a party. She asked her parents, who lived next door, to watch Delishia.
Colondres’ father got some cookies out of the refrigerator and gave one to his granddaughter, who chewed on it and began to choke.
Relatives brought the baby back to Colondres’ house, and Delishia started turning blue.
They tried patting her on the back, but it wasn’t working and Colondres called 911 for help.
“I performed CPR on other people, but I couldn’t do it on my own [daughter],” said Colondres, a native of Puerto Rico who is now an office manager in a doctor’s office.
The harried Colondres put down the phone, and Rivera picked it up to talk to the dispatcher.
Drozdowski was working one of his occasional shifts as an emergency dispatcher.
Six months earlier, on Dec. 22, 1995, Drozdowski’s 40-year-old brother, Dennis, had died of a heart attack at his work.
The loss crushed Ken, who still remembers his brother’s house exactly as it looked when he stopped by later that day, including the image of Dennis’ coat hanging on the wall.
No one at the plant knew how to help Dennis Drozdowski, a failing that set Ken on a “crusade” — his word — to teach people basic life-support skills.
At the time, Drozdowski was an Army Reserve medic in training as a New York State paramedic, so he was well-prepared to answer the 911 call.
He told Rivera to hold the baby face down at an angle and to pat her back, but the baby still wasn’t breathing, Rivera said.
Several people passed Delishia around while trying to help.
“It was a very scary moment,” Rivera said.
Drozdowski told Rivera to continue patting Delishia’s back and to try to sweep the food out of the baby’s mouth. Finally, Delishia vomited and cried.
“That was like music to everyone’s ears,” Rivera said.
This lasted about four minutes, but it felt like “forever,” said Colondres, whose tone softens when she talks about her daughter’s brush with death.
News organizations quickly picked up on the story, contacting Colondres for interviews and persuading Drozdowski to stop by the party to meet Delishia.
A Buffalo News photo published the next day captured the moment Drozdowski and Delishia first locked eyes. He took off his hat, put it on the baby’s head and picked her up.
She then ruined the storybook moment by crying, Drozdowski recalled with a laugh.
Because it was Mother’s Day, Drozdowski had plans to go to his mother’s for dinner. After seeing Delishia, he didn’t make it on time.
“They asked me why I was late,” Drozdowski recalled. “I said, ‘You’ll never believe it, Mom.’ ”
Not a hero
Drozdowski didn’t consider himself a hero, and Rivera gave all the credit to God.
The choking made Colondres more protective of Delishia and other kids. She said she doesn’t like her daughter to eat hard candy, and she once found herself staring with concern at a child sucking on a lollipop.
Delishia, of course, was too young to remember that day.
“I learned about this when I was 4 or 5,” Delishia said, but she didn’t find out until later how close she came to dying.
The pretty, polite teenager said the traumatic event might have had a subconscious effect.
“I have to chew my pills, I can’t swallow them. I try so hard, but it feels like it’s going to get stuck,” the Lackawanna High School freshman said.
For Drozdowski’s part, he occasionally thought about Delishia, and he was curious what kind of a person she’d grown into.
“You always wonder: We saved a life, but what kind of a life is it going to be?” he said.
Colondres recorded the TV news broadcasts and watched them for the first time in years a few months ago, about when she began planning the Quinceanera — pronounced “keen-see-NYAIR-ah.”
The celebration, in the Puerto Rican and some other communities, is held on or around a girl’s 15th birthday and is comparable in some ways to a coming-out ball or a bat mitzvah.
Delishia had a lot of relatives, including Rivera in Connecticut, coming here for the party.
Colondres wanted Drozdowski to be there, but she was having trouble finding him online. They had lost touch after Drozdowski went through a divorce and became harder to reach.
But in February, Colondres and Delishia went to an Ash Wednesday Mass at St. Anthony’s Church in Lackawanna.
As churchgoers milled around after the service, someone standing near the front of the church yelled for somebody to call 911 because a man had passed out in front of the altar.
A group of firefighters walked in, and Colondres said she felt palpitations in her chest.
“I share with Delishia, ‘I think that’s Ken,’ ” Colondres said. “I feel something very powerful.”
That firefighter left the church before Colondres could approach him, so she went up to his partner, Firefighter Chris Georgevich, and asked if the other firefighter was named something like “Ken Droski.”
“He said yes,” Colondres recalled. “I said, ‘Oh my God — I knew it, I knew it.’ ”
As Drozdowski stood outside filling out his report, Georgevich told him that a woman at the church said she knew him.
When Colondres and Delishia walked out of St. Anthony’s, they saw Drozdowski, now a lieutenant, and he saw them.
“They were standing there, and I just froze,” Drozdowski said. “I froze — I couldn’t begin to process it. And [then] everything came back to me. This whole scene came back to me.”
He started to walk through the cold toward the two women.
“There he comes,” Colondres said, “and he say, ‘I hope you’re not eating a cookie.’ ”
The trio laughed, hugged each other and cried. Drozdowski asked Delishia a few questions, and she said something that was 14 years in the making.
“Thank you for saving my life,” she told him.
At the Quinceanera on Saturday, Drozdowski arrived bearing gifts and a huge smile. His boys and his fiancee, Denamarie, were with him to share the moment inside the Seneca Hose Co. on Seneca Street.
“It’s a celebration of life,” he said. “It’s so nice to see what she has become.” He explained that he’s asking Delishia to become a CPR instructor someday.
“I’m going to mentor her,” he said.
In her white gown, Delishia said she didn’t have words to describe what it meant to have Drozdowski present. “Now I have shared a special day with him,” she said.
And yes, she’s willing to be schooled in cardiopulmonary resuscitation because “no one should have to go through what my Mom went through,” she said.
Colondres has two heroes.
“To save and bring your daughter back, that is a gift from God,” she said. “I feel blessed. It’s a blessing, and I’ll never stop thanking Ken and Wanda for what they did that day.”
Copyright 2010 The Buffalo News