Boy suffering asthma attack during flooding dies

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- He would have turned 9 years old next Sunday.

Noah Delgado, 8, died Wednesday following an asthma attack during this week's flooding. His mother says help could not arrive quickly enough.

"He was getting worse and worse by the second. I had my girlfriend call 911," said Tina Galan. His rescue inhaler wasn't helping.

She says dispatchers seemed to ask endless questions. She knew there was high water nearby on Huffmeister Road where the entrances sit to the apartment complex where they live. Frustrated, she called 911 herself. At least twice. She says it rang and rang and no one answered. Frantic, she ran outside with her son, thinking she had to find a way to get him to the hospital.

Outside, she noticed he wasn't breathing.

"I sat here and laid him down and did CPR on him," she said.

Strangers saw her distress. Someone -- she doesn't know who -- picked them up in a truck and started driving them to the hospital. Part of the way there they flagged down the ambulance that was headed to help Noah.

"Everyone told me he's going to be ok. He's going to be ok," said Galan.

He wasn't.

At the North Cypress Medical Center, doctors realized little Noah needed more care than they could give. She says he was airlifted to Texas Children's Hospital - West Campus. As there was not enough room in the helicopter, Tina had to go separately on the ground. She got stuck in floodwaters. She was frightened.

Someone rescued her - she thinks the National Guard, but she can't be sure. They drove her to the other hospital. Once there, she got the news she feared. Noah's brain had been deprived of oxygen too long. He had no brain activity. He was pronounced dead Wednesday.

She would like Noah remembered as the loving boy he was: a son, brother, friend, classmate. She says he was an "A" student just about to begin the third grade. She describes him as a "character."

"He just loved. He didn't care what you looked like, who you were," she lamented.

Through all this she does not blame anyone else for the circumstances which led to her son's death. "If anybody, I blame myself...because I'm supposed to keep anything from happening to him," she said.

Friends and family have set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for Noah's funeral and medical expenses related to his death.

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