Kimberly Hanline went home from work and hugged her son.
"He just looked up at me, but he knew that I had cried."
Hanline was the first Baltimore police officer to help 5-year-old Raven Wyatt after she had collapsed on Pulaski Street from a bullet fired into her head last summer. Hanline and Officer Monica Nashan cradled the wounded girl and restored her pulse with chest compressions.
"When we did CPR, she started to move," Hanline said.
Both officers later went home to their own children, emotionally drained from a day that would become a focal point for a city tired of shootings and upset that an innocent girl had been hit by a stray bullet as she walked home from a store carrying a new set of hair beads.
Hanline and Nashan joined more than two dozen other police officers honored Wednesday for their service to the city. Recipients included officers shot in the line of duty and officers who shot others to save themselves and their partners.
Some officers had talked people out of committing suicide. One pulled a driver from a burning car. Officers Jerome Shaurette and Curtis McMillion received the department's highest award, the Medal of Honor, for returning fire after they were shot during a gunbattle in the aftermath of a domestic assault.
The city's mayor offered comforting words to the officers and their families gathered in the auditorium at police headquarters on Fayette Street, and Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III spoke of "incredible acts of heroism and self-sacrifice."
Shootings of children can affect even the most hardened police officers. Hanline sped to Pulaski Street last July to find the little girl sprawled on the pavement, her pink sandals lying near her near-lifeless body. Hanline checked the girl's pulse and got a faint reading.
Nashan arrived seconds later and rubbed the girl's forehead, but got no response. Hanline checked her pulse again and this time felt none. She held Raven's head, and Nashan began chest compressions until paramedics arrived and rushed the girl to a hospital. By that time, she again had a pulse.
Raven survived, even after faltering during her recovery and falling into a coma. Now 6 years old, she's home with family, still struggling with balance and still living with the bullet lodged in her brain. Lamont Davis was convicted in the shooting and sentenced last month to life plus 30 years in prison.
Nashan said that after the shooting, she went straight home to her 12-year-old daughter and gave her a hug, though she spared her daughter the details from Pulaski Street. "Some things don't need to be told," she said.
Hanline's son Tommy, who is now 10, joined his mom at Wednesday's award ceremony but didn't quite know what to say when asked about what his mother had gone through that night.
The officer said she didn't know Raven had survived the shooting until a few months ago. She was in a grocery store and noticed a headline over a newspaper article documenting the girl's remarkable recovery.
The few minutes she spent with Raven on Pulaski Street still haunt her.
"All the time, I kept calling out her name, but she wouldn't respond," Hanline said.
Raven is responding now, and in no small part because of the two police officers who held her and talked to her and revived her arrested pulse.
Each officer received, appropriately, the department's "Life Saving Award."