Officer Tiffany Ortiz didn’t notice the crowd gathering on the street in the dark. She didn’t notice the upset mom.
“I had tunnel vision,” Ortiz recalled. “I was going to get on the roof” to prevent a baby from tumbling off.
A distraught father was perched at the edge of the roof, legs dangling over the edge. And his three-month-old son Johnathan on his lap.
Adrenalin kicked in. Ortiz raced upstairs, to one of the first encounters in her young police career in which a life hung in the balance.
“Work”
Ortiz on patrol in the Hill.
Ortiz did have some training in responding to a frantic, life-or-death situation. During her field training, before she started walking a beat on Congress Avenue last July, she was among the first cops on the scene around 5:30 a.m. when a Yale student stabbed a fellow student then leaped to his death from the ninth floor of the Taft Apartments. Days later she was at the scene of multiple shooting at a downtown club.
Ortiz, a Wilbur Cross High grad and the daughter of veteran Hill cop Carlos Ortiz, discovered that she enjoyed the less dramatic part of police work: hanging out with people. Getting to know them. Especially young people. On Stevens Street, 10, 11-year-olds would ask her to play music and dance with with them; she keeps a video on her iPhone of them all boogying together to Rhianna’s “Work.”
“That’s my favorite part of the job,” she said. “Kids.”
“She can relate to the kids. It comes off as genuine,” observed her boss, top Hill North cop Lt. Brendan Hosey.
She continued stopping by the kids when she was assigned to a patrol car this March for the afternoon-evening B shift. Then, earlier this month, amid a staff shortage, she was reassigned again to the 11 p.m.-7 a.m. C shift, when most young kids were off the street.
Last Friday at 2:30 a.m., one baby was outside, and in trouble.
Ortiz was writing a report in the passenger seat of a patrol car parked near the Congress Street substation when the call came over the radio: A woman was reporting that “the child of her father is on the roof of their apartment with their three-month child.”
Her partner that night (cops were doubling up in the wake of the Dallas police shootings), Officer Dana Smith, was behind the wheel. He headed right to the three-story apartment building, on Davenport Avenue.
They were the first to arrive on scene. The mother had opened the front door. Ortiz said she hopped out of the patrol car before it had fully stopped. She ran straight into the building.
Officer Smith got out, too. The mother was outside the building, along with a growing number of onlookers. Johnathan’s father had his legs dangling over the edge of a roof to a second-story porch, the baby visible on his lap. Smith spoke to the man as Ortiz, who ran track in high school, raced to the open window leading from the second-floor foyer to the roof.
Ortiz opened a screen to get on the roof, onto the roof, which was no more than five feet long, she said.
“I had a motherly instinct,” she said. “I had to get that baby.”
The man, who is 21 years old, had his back to her.
“I didn’t want to startle him. I didn’t want to upset him. His legs are off the edge; the baby was off the edge.”
The man did have a good hold on Johnathan. She asked the man’s name. He told her. She continued, addressing him by name.
“Listen,” she said. “What’s going on.”
He turned his head to look at her.
He’d had an argument with Johnathan’s mother, with whom he shares an apartment even though they’re no longer romantically involved.
“I just want to take my baby and go. I wanna leave,” he said. He said it again. And again.
“That’s fine,” Ortiz told him. “We can all go inside. You have to do me a favor, though. You have to hand me the baby.”
“Hand Officer Ortiz the baby,” Smith called up from the street.
And the man complied.
Ortiz held Johnathan tight. At first glance, he seemed OK. “I felt instant relief,” Ortiz recalled.
She brought the baby back in the hallway. She coaxed the father inside, too.
He never wanted to hurt Johnathan, he told her. “He said his child’s mother wouldn’t listen to him. He wanted to get her attention.”
He succeeded.
Johnathan was calm. “A very cute, adorable baby,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz charged the man with risk of injury to a minor, reckless endangerment, and breach of peace. She had him committed for psychological review.
Reality Sinks In
Meanwhile, an ambulance crew took the baby to the hospital to be inspected. The mother followed.
Ortiz returned to her car to start on the paperwork from the incident. Wasn’t going to happen. The gravity of the encounter hit her. Her hands shook uncontrollably.
“‘I feel like throwing up,’” she remembered telling her supervising sergeant, Ron Ferrante.
Ferrante could see the enormity hit Ortiz — and he saw how she had kept her cool to save a life. “We just had a talk that night about putting ourselves in situations — We act first, think later,” he later told the Independent. “She did just an amazing job. That little roof area couldn’t have been bigger than four-by-four or six-by six. Anything could have gone wrong.”
“At first, it was all adrenaline,” Ortiz recalled. Then, when you think about what just happened, it was overwhelming.”
The paperwork could wait. Ortiz drove to the hospital. “I couldn’t go home,” she said, “without first knowing the baby was OK.” She sat with Johnathan and hung around until 5:30 a.m., when word came that the boy was in fine physical condition.
At 26, Ortiz does not have children of her own. Yet. She said she fully intends to be a mom one day. Meanwhile, she has a neighborhood full of kids to watch over.
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