‘You saved him’: Police commander back on the job thanks to his teenage son’s heroics

A lot of things that weren’t supposed to happen had to happen for Rolling Meadows police Cmdr. Sam Mollenhauer to get back on the job this week, almost three months after suffering near-fatal cardiac arrest.

Like his teenage son learning CPR in school just weeks earlier, in a elective course he took only because the art class he preferred didn’t fit his schedule.

Or 13-year-old Ethan being home to perform it April 17, only because he’d been released from school early that Friday afternoon.

Or that despite his son’s heroics and the best efforts of health care providers, Sam still only had about a 5% chance of surviving, doctors would later say.

But thanks to a good student, good care and good luck, the 22-year police department veteran returned to the force Monday.

“I'm super grateful that he's such a great student, and that he paid attention, and that he knew what to do,” Sam Mollenhauer said of Ethan this week. “I had a great (medical) staff caring for me, had a great ambulance crew that came and helped, and the dispatchers that dispatched the call.

“In those moments, seconds matter, and everybody plays such an incredibly important role, and I'm just so grateful to all them for that, and obviously mostly grateful for my son,” he added. “He's definitely one of a kind.”

For Ethan, now 14 years old and preparing for his freshman year at Fremd High School in Palatine, the weeks since April 17 have seen him honored with lifesaving awards from the village of Palatine and city of Rolling Meadows, and an Above and Beyond award from Palatine Township Elementary School District 15.

That wasn’t anywhere near Ethan’s mind that Friday afternoon, when he heard a crash coming from the upstairs of his family’s Palatine home. He stepped away from his homework to investigate and found his father lying on a bedroom floor.

He called 911 and began performing CPR as he’d been taught in the Medical Detectives class he was taking as an 8th grader at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Hoffman Estates.

As his mom, Kelly Mollenhauer, told us this week, Ethan enrolled in Medical Detectives only because he couldn’t get into the art class he hoped to take.

“If he hadn't been in that class, this never would have had this outcome,” she said. “They don’t teach CPR to everybody. It's not in health, it's not in PE, it's only the kids who get in this class.”

Ethan performed CPR on his dad for about seven minutes before paramedics arrived and took over. It felt much quicker.

“I just had so much adrenaline, I couldn't really think about anything,” Ethan recalled. “Everything happened really fast. From my point of view, I thought I was only doing CPR for 30 seconds.”

Sam was rushed to Endeavor Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights then Endeavor Glenbrook Hospital in Glenview, where he spent five weeks recovering — the first three under heavy sedation. All he remembers of his ordeal is staying home from work April 17 because he felt under the weather, then waking up weeks later in a hospital.

His doctors would later tell him he had a 100% arterial blockage that led to his cardiac arrest. The chances of survival when that occurs outside a hospital are only about 5%, a surgeon told his family.

Sam calls the experience “very surreal” after spending more than two decades on the other side of life-and-death situations and viewing them as just part of the job.

“It's really eye opening to see it from the other side,” he said.

Despite the awards and attention, Ethan isn’t reveling in thoughts of being a hero. In fact, he prefers not to look back on the day he nearly lost his father.

“I feel like I did a good thing, but I really don’t like thinking about it a lot,” Ethan told us.

That hasn’t stopped word of Ethan’s heroism from spreading across two towns, his former school district and the litany of doctors, nurses and other medical providers who cared for his dad.

“Every doctor, every nurse we ever talked to — they all knew about Ethan,” Kelly Mollenhauer said. “They all would walk in the room — it doesn't matter if it was a therapist, a nurse, this hospital, that hospital — they were like, 'You saved him.’ They all knew, and they all kept saying that it was him that did that.”

Sentencing in fatal ODs

An Elgin man linked to fatal overdoses of four people who ingested cocaine laced with fentanyl across the suburbs in 2023 has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for two of those deaths.

McHenry County Judge Judge Tiffany Davis handed down the sentence Wednesday to Jarrail Ford-Gresham, 36, after he pleaded guilty to two counts of drug-induced homicide.

The charges stem from the overdoses of a 45-year-old woman and 48-year-old man found dead Dec. 1, 2023, in a Marengo apartment. Prosecutors said investigators located a white powdery substance that tested positive for cocaine and fentanyl in the residence, and autopsies determined both died of fentanyl overdoses.

Text messages on one of the victim’s phones connected Ford-Greshman as the drug supplier, authorities said.

Ford-Gresham is awaiting further sentencing Aug. 7 in Kane County, where he pleaded guilty last month to two additional charges of drug-induced homicide, court records show.

That case stems from charges brought by the Illinois Attorney General, which accused Ford-Gresham of supplying the drugs that killed a person found dead in an Elgin homeless encampment and another in a Palatine motel, between Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 2023.

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