By the time Michelle Burton and a dozen other Birmingham, Ala., police officers arrived at an apartment Tuesday night, it was too late to save a 30-year-old man, who died of an apparent drug overdose.
On the couch lay a 35-year-old woman, slack and unresponsive, but with a faint pulse. Paramedics on the scene administered a dose of Narcan, a fast-acting opioid antidote, before rushing her to the hospital.
Then there was the matter of the couple’s shaken children: a 7-year-old girl, a 3-year-old boy, a 2-year-old boy and a 1-month-old girl clad in a tiny purple gingham dress.
They were being comforted by next-door neighbors, the same ones who had dialed 911 earlier after hearing the older girl crying out: Help! We can’t wake mom and dad up.
Protocol dictated that the children would need to be taken to the South Precinct, then to family court and finally to the custody of Child Protective Services at DHR, the Alabama Department of Human Resources.
It was already 9 p.m. Burton, less than two hours away from finishing her usual shift, let her husband know she was going to be home late from work that day.
“It was horrible,” Burton told The Washington Post. “It was a very sad situation.”
But it was not, she said, the first such situation they found themselves in.
An officer-in-training with Burton lent the two boys his flashlight; soon, the toddlers were running around, shining it in people’s faces.
The 7-year-old was quieter, Burton said. The officer asked if she needed anything.
The girl asked if someone could sign her homework, so she could turn it in to her teacher the next day.
“That broke my heart,” said Burton. “She said, ‘I did my work.’ She pulled it out and showed it to us. It was math homework, (like) ‘Which number is greater? Which number is odd or even?’ … I told her, ‘Sweetie, you probably won’t have to go to school tomorrow. … But where you’re going is going to have everything you need.'”
In the apartment, Burton found an unopened can of infant formula and a baby bottle; she grabbed both.
At the precinct, officers bought whatever the other kids wanted to eat from a vending machine. There, Burton removed her vest and other police gear so she could comfortably hold the infant and give her a bottle. It had to have been hours since she had been fed, Burton thought.
“A lot of us are parents,” Birmingham police spokesman Lt. Sean Edwards told The Post. “We just go into parent mode and not necessarily police mode. … Officer Burton, she just really wanted to grab the baby and just cuddle the baby.”
So she did. Soon, the infant was sound asleep on Burton’s shoulder.
At some point, someone in the precinct captured a photo of the tender scene, which Burton later showed her husband.
Edwards said he wasn’t surprised by Burton’s actions. The department has more than 800 sworn officers, and they have to be prepared for dozens of different scenarios, he said.
“It’s a part of our job, it’s a part of what we see, what we do. Our concern is to preserve, to protect,” he said. “We find ourselves in a lot of situations like this.”
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