For nearly 20 minutes, the life of another person was in the hands of Ben Peco, a magnet medical student at Hammond High Magnet School — and he had thought he was just meeting a friend at the barbershop. 17 year old Ben Peco, who successfully performed CPR on a woman having a seizure, is pictured above with his HHMS teacher, Ms. Kerrin Sitman. “Ben had a lot of practice with this,” Sitman said. “We went over CPR for nearly a month and a half, and from what he told me, he handled it like someone who’s been doing this for at least 10 years. I’m like a proud mom.” Although he knew exactly what to do, Peco didn’t realize the magnitude of the situation until after the fact. “It hit me about 10 minutes after Acadian left, and I kept thinking, ‘What did I just do?’” he said. The incident further justified Peco’s desire to have a career in the medical field, he said. “Seeing what I learned work and dealing with it like that made me more passionate about it,” he said.

Click here to read the entire Daily Star article by Reporter Bridgette Bonner .