June 16, 2015 –A fifteen-year-old boy nearly died when he was hit in the chest by a baseball. The Long Island, N.Y., teen was practicing pitching when he suffered cardiac arrest after being struck in the chest by a line drive off the bat of his younger brother. The boys’ parents looked on in horror as their oldest son lay unconscious in the batting cage.

An off-duty Suffolk County police sergeant witnessed the commotion and ran into the nearby concession building to grab the AED Plus®, a donation to the Little League from the Rocky Point Fire Department. “I went inside and put the pads on him, turned the machine on, and just listened to the prompts,” he said. “The machines are pretty simple to operate.” The AED Plus first instructed CPR be administered, then it called for a shock to the boy’s chest. He was alert when he was taken to the hospital.

The teen was released from the hospital the next day, just in time for Mother’s Day. His mother called it “the best Mother’s Day ever, my son was with me!” Now the family wants to make sure that every Little League field has a defibrillator like the one that helped save the life of their son.