A New Jersey 16-year-old saved a 3-week-old with CPR she had learned two days earlier
Ariana Leonardis, 16, learned CPR in a childcare class. Two days later a couple’s 3-week-old son stopped breathing in a parking lot in Tuckerton, New Jersey, and she gave him chest compressions until he started to cry.
4 November 2026
Photo: Ocean County Vocational Technical School, via NBC10 Philadelphia
A 16-year-old from Tuckerton, New Jersey, brought back a 3-week-old baby who had stopped breathing in a parking lot on 24 October, two days after she learned CPR at school, NBC10 Philadelphia reported.
Ariana Leonardis is a junior at Pinelands Regional High School. She also takes a human development and childcare course at the Brick Center of the Ocean County Vocational Technical School, and that week the class had covered CPR.
The parking lot
On the evening of 24 October her cousin, Riley Porter, 15, was at a Wawa when he heard a couple screaming. Their son had stopped breathing in the lot of a former urgent care building, and they were begging for help in Spanish.
Leonardis asked the parents if they needed CPR and started chest compressions on the baby. Porter called 911 and told the dispatcher the baby was not breathing. He could follow what the parents were saying because his Spanish class had gone over it the week before, and he told the station Spanish is his favourite class.
The baby started coughing and crying. He was awake when the ambulance crew arrived, and they took him to a nearby hospital.
The class
Leonardis told NBC10 that in the moment the only thing she could think about was getting the baby breathing again. “Knowledge is power,” said Michelle Keenan, her instructor.
The school has since given Leonardis a Random Act of Kindness award.
Carry a story in five words
We run a game called Long Story Short: one real news sentence a day, and you keep the five words that carry it. Today’s is below. Do play.
How to play
One real news sentence. The job is to keep the five words that carry the story and let the rest go, then guess. Blue means the right word in the right place, orange the right word in the wrong place.
Yesterday: Carrying a bucket of feed into a field down the road, women at a Stourbridge riding yard rescued the horses from a wildfire that burned it minutes later. The five were women rescued horses from wildfire.