Police From All Over Rally To Lift Spirits Of North Texas Child Battling Cancer
IRVING, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) - Police officers are supposed to be there when you need them and they certainly were for a 6-year-old Irving boy.
They answered the call and helped a sick child beat cancer.
When he insisted on wearing a police officer costume every day for a week, it became clear an early age what Bennett Hernandez wanted to be when he grew up.
"Because I can catch bad guys and beat them up and take them to jail," said Bennett.
But over the summer the child's dreams of becoming a police officer were put on hold.
"And I came home and I looked at it that day, and I said, 'Oh my God,' that was on his right side, just a huge, huge lump," said Bennett's mother, Raynie Hernandez.
That lump on Bennett's neck turned out to be cancer.
"You hear cancer and you immediately think the worst," said Raynie.
Weeks of chemo treatments at Children's Medical Center soon followed.
During that time, a retired Dallas officer, Jerry Rhodes, sent out a message to departments everywhere asking for police patches to lift Bennett's spirits.
"There was one day he had 22 packages in the mail," Raynie said.
Patches, hats, shirts, blankets began arriving everyday.
"It really helped to distract him, a lot of the letters I think people were writing to him about the cancer they've experienced," said Raynie.
The response was so overwhelming that Bennett and his parents still haven't has time to go through all of it.
Care packages from hundreds of police agencies some from as far away as Ireland.
Now, thanks to his medical care and support from law enforcement around the world, Bennett rang the bell at Children's after his last treatment left him cancer-free.
"That was a moment of euphoria really to see how excited he got," said Fernan Hernandez, Bennett's father.
Bennett can now get back to just being a boy.
And if his dreams changes they often do, at least he will always have a reminder of the time his friends in blue were there for him.