A St. Paul police sergeant says God put her and other officers in the right place at the right time when a runner collapsed during the Twin Cities Marathon weekend 10k.
Sgt. Colleen Rooney and three other officers gave CPR to the man, who’s in his early 40s and who’d gone into cardiac arrest during last October’s 6.2-mile race. He survived.
“You never know when your last day is,” Rooney said. “We’re really lucky to have been trained and have instinct kick in.”
Deputy St. Paul Police Chief Tim Flynn presented the department’s Life-Saving Award to Rooney, Sgts. Christopher Langr and Timothy Moore, and Officer Jonathan Schroeder on Thursday.
He told them they acted selflessly and bravely, and their “decision-making and ability to remain calm under pressure undoubtedly made a significant difference in the outcome of the incident.”
‘Team effort’
Moore and Rooney were supervisors along the race route. Officers are assigned to main streets, but not all smaller streets. Moore pointed out there wasn’t an officer at Summit Avenue and Griggs Street, and suggested Rooney cover it.
“I took his direction and went there, and that’s exactly the intersection where this man went down,” Rooney said. “… I think God put us there at the right time.”
Rooney began CPR and radioed that the runner was unconscious and not breathing. Moore arrived to assist with CPR, as did Schroeder and Langr, who was an officer at the time.
It was “completely a team effort,” Moore said. Doing CPR “is exhausting. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize, I guess ’til you’ve done it in real life, that it takes a lot out of you. And we needed to rotate, and that’s what we were doing.”
Runners “stopped to check, to … see if there was anything that they could do to help,” Moore added.
St. Paul Fire Department medics had to contend with Summit Avenue being closed for the race and the large number of runners to get there, Flynn said. They delivered a shock to the man using a defibrillator and his heart started pumping again. They transported him to Regions Hospital for treatment.
The officers received an update the next day that the man had survived.
2nd life-saving award for 2 of the officers
Rooney said of Schroeder, who became a St. Paul officer in 2024: “This young man … was in his second phase of field training … and did an amazing job.”
Moore said that every time he puts on his uniform, he tries to be ready for anything that could happen.
“How I feel about it is fortunate,” he said.
“There’s people that sit home and watch the news and say, ‘Gosh, I wish I could have been there to do something.’ … With this job, we’re fortunate enough to be in those situations where we can do things to help people, and that’s why it’s the best job around.”
Still, Moore felt mixed emotions about receiving the award.
“This is what we’re supposed to do,” he said of their actions. It “shouldn’t be anything really out of the ordinary. But at the same time, it’s cool that the chief and people recognize this.”
The Life-Saving Award is the fourth highest honor in the St. Paul Police Department.
For Langr and Rooney, it was their second time receiving the award.
Langr was a recipient after he and another officer were on patrol in 2021, heard gunshots and found a victim with life-threatening injuries. Rooney received it for providing aid to a woman after a serious domestic assault in the early 2010s.
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