Aiden didn’t notice a thing.
He was 13 months old when Hurricane Harvey turned his Houston neighborhood into a river. On Sunday, August 27, 2017, his mother, Catherine Pham, waited on the second floor of her home in the Meyerland area as the water continued to rise. A team of six men arrived in a motorized boat, and among them was Daryl Hudeck, an officer with the Houston Police Department’s SWAT team.
They were taken out of the house and toward dry land via Interstate 610. Hudeck carried Catherine through knee-deep water as she held her son, wrapped in a blanket, against her chest. As they made their way along, the little boy fell asleep. AP photographer David J. Phillip captured the moment, and by the next day, the image was appearing on front pages and social media as a symbol of the storm.
The officer managed to ask Catherine her son’s name and how many months old he was. Then he went off to help more people. Everything happened so quickly that the family didn’t manage to thank him or ask for his contact information. That night, Catherine wrote on Facebook: “The house is completely flooded, but at least we’re all together”.