New video shows Florida deputy saving child from hot car

SANFORD (WOFL FOX 35) - Dramatic new video shows the moments a child was saved from a hot car by a Seminole County deputy earlier this summer. 

For more than 12 hours, the 3-year-old girl had sat in a sweltering car. Seminole County Deputy Bill Dunn is seen on the dash camera video rushing to rescue her limp body. 

“Sadly, I didn’t think she was alive when I got to her,” Dunn said in a video produced by the Seminole County Sheriff's Office. 

It was Father’s Day. As a father himself, Dunn feared the worst. 

“I felt for a pulse,” he continued. “I didn’t feel a pulse.”

In the new video, he is seen running to his cruiser trying to get the toddler in front of the air conditioning. 

“Once the cold air hit her, that’s when I started noticing her eyes kind of fluttering,” Dunn recalled. 

With no time to wait for an ambulance, he rushed her to the hospital with his siren blaring -- the entire time encouraging her to hold on. 

“It’s OK, baby. Talk to me! You’re OK,” he is heard saying on the footage. 

At the trauma center, he carried her one last time inside to the waiting medical team. 

After placing her in their care, he was exhausted. With his heart still racing, he finally slumped over beside his patrol car. 

“It was a heck of a thing to experience that adrenaline dump. And then when it finally goes away, how it really does affect the body,” he said. 

Dunn said he waited for a couple of hours at the emergency room until doctors told him the child would be OK. Three days later, the little girl got to meet her hero – the deputy who saved her life.

“Sometimes we’re able to have a moment like this that makes it all worthwhile,” Dunn said. 

According to investigators, Casey Keller, the girl’s mother, left her daughter strapped in her car seat overnight after a liquor run. She called 911 the next morning claiming that someone stole her car with the child inside. 

The mother was arrested and faces charges of child neglect and great bodily harm.