NEWARK, NJ (AP) – When a passenger was hit by Newark Liberty International Airport, police received the assistance of a famous doctor: Mehmet Oz.
The incident occurred Monday night when Port Authority agent Jeffrey Croissant saw the 60-year-old man fall to the ground near a baggage reclaim area.
Croissant requested a backup and immediately began CPR on the unidentified man, who was not breathing and did not appear to have dust, according to the port authority.
When another person came to help him, Croissant did not immediately recognize that he was Oz, the heart surgeon and longtime host of the nearby “Dr. Oz Show” television show.
The two performed CPR on the man together until three other officers brought oxygen and a defibrillator for the man, who eventually recovered his pulse and was taken to a hospital for evaluation.
“What better help than having a heart surgeon?” Croissant said later.
Oz told “Good Morning America” that his daughter alerted him to the man and that when he turned to look, he saw the man lying on the ground with a pool of blood next to his head.
The defibrillator “diagnosed that his heart had stopped, as I had thought was the case when he couldn’t get a pulse,” Oz said. “It simply came to our notice then. And have you seen those movies where the patient is surprised and sinks? This is exactly what happened. Normally, the heart does not start again … in this case, like the cinema, its heart began ”.
Oz has helped the wounded on numerous occasions.
In 2015, emergency officers who arrived at the scene of a crash on the New Jersey Highway found that Oz was already treating two injured people. And two years earlier, he was helping a British tourist who had his foot cut when a taxi driver jumped off the sidewalk at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan.