Camden police rescue two in distress; chief aids in one

Police came to the rescue twice in less than an hour in downtown Camden on Thursday.

They removed a baby locked alone and in distress in a hot car, and less than an hour later, with Camden County Police Chief Scott Thomson lending a hand, revived a man from a drug overdose.

Officer Belinda Villegas-Ramos was working a security detail at a TD Bank office on Mickle Boulevard shortly before noon when a passerby told her a baby was crying in a car parked outside a nearby CVS pharmacy.

The officer, seeing the baby boy sweating and crying hysterically, tried to break a car window before calling for backup, Camden County spokesman Dan Keashen said.

Another officer then broke into the car with his baton, and Villegas-Ramos took the baby, less than 6 months old, into the air-conditioned bank. Ambulances arrived to take the child to Cooper University Hospital.

When the child's mother, 30-year-old Deonna Moore of Sicklerville, came out of the pharmacy at some point, she was arrested. She faces charges of child endangerment.

Less than an hour later, the same area was the scene of another rescue when officers on foot patrol near the Walter Rand Transportation Center got a tip about a man stricken by a drug overdose.

Thomson was in a nearby vehicle and responded with a dose of Narcan that Officer Stephen Bezich used to revive the man, Keashen said.