Off-duty Cop Saves Dad's Life

Maureen Messmer was fresh on the Redmond police force when she suddenly found herself using the CPR training she’d just had.

What made her even more grateful that she knew what to do? The patient was her father.

On Jan. 20, just days after she graduated from the police academy, Messmer was off duty and at her parents’ Sammamish home making lunch when she heard her mother, Dana Messmer, screaming. Maureen Messmer rushed to her parents’ room to find her father, Michael Messmer, on his bed, not breathing. The 30-year-old officer called 911 and her mother went outside to flag down paramedics.

Messmer, though terrified, started chest compressions.

“I was crying the whole time,” she said. Shortly after she began performing CPR, Messmer feared her father had died.

“All the muscle tension went away in his body. I thought he was probably dead,” she said.

But Messmer continued with chest compressions, and after about five minutes, paramedics arrived and took over the effort to resuscitate 62-year-old Michael Messmer. The responders put him in a hypothermic state while they took him to the hospital. In all, it took about an hour to resuscitate him.

Today, Michael Messmer is recovering well and plans to soon return to work at Boeing, with a new outlook on life.

Jim Whitney and David Humblad, the Redmond paramedics who arrived first on the scene, say it was Messmer’s actions that saved her father because she kept his brain alive until they arrived.

“Maureen’s efforts saved her father. She was doing incredible CPR,” Whitney said at a news conference Thursday at the .

When Messmer’s 911 call came in, the two paramedics were at the police station taking a break from teaching a CPR refresher class to police officers. At the time, they had no idea that Messmer was a police officer, they said.

“It was the first time I’ve seen a relative doing CPR successfully,” said Humblad, who has been a paramedic for eight years.

The news conference served as a rare opportunity for the paramedics to meet one of their patients. They greeted the Messmers, and all expressed gratitude and amazement at how many fortuitous circumstances aligned to save Michael Messmer that day.

“Thanks for not giving up,” he told the paramedics. To his daughter, he said: “I’m just totally amazed that anyone had the guts to do that. To do it for your own family must have been much harder.”

Maureen Messmer, who also serves as a lieutenant in the Washington Army National Guard, says that even though the experience was frightening, she is glad to have gone through this dramatic situation at the start of her career as a police officer.

“I’m really grateful going forward in my career, to be able to understand what families experience,” she said. She advises everyone to learn or refresh their CPR knowledge and to be persistent in their efforts, even if it appears there’s no hope.

“If this happens to you, don’t give up," she said. "Keep going until help arrives.”

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect first name for Maureen Messner's father. His name is Michael Messmer.