HAMPTON, Va. (WAVY) — “I kept telling them something was wrong.”
Leandra Johnson fought back the tears as she removed the mist from her glasses. She was visiting family while living in Rhode Island in January 2007. She was due to give birth in about three weeks, but the discomfort prompted her to get the nearest hospital. Shortly after her baby boy was born, he stopped breathing.
“He came out and told us, ‘He’s not breathing,'” Johnson said.
Doctors couldn’t get a pulse, and Leandra’s baby stopped breathing for 65 minutes.
What came next hit like the cold January wind.
“The doctor was telling us, our baby was dead,” she said.
That’s all Leandra Johnson could remember before a miraculous turn of events.
Father Timothy Reilly, chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of Providence, explains what happened next:
“The attending doctor that night called out for Father Valera’s help, who said, ‘It’s all up to you now. We’re done, we’ve done everything we can,'” Reilly said. “He went out to tell the parents that the baby was dead clinically. He came back and the gynecologist said, ‘Not so fast,’ and pulled him into the side room to tell him that the baby now had a heartbeat.
It was as if the hand of God touched little Tyquan Johnson and lifted him to life.
Doctors say Tyquan hadn’t taken a breath for more than hour. It seemed his premature birth had lasted mere moments.
Father Valera, in this case, was a 19th century Catholic priest from Spain. Father Salvador Valera Para came from the same village as the doctor who called his name, and in June of this year, following a years-long investigation, Pope Leo XIV declared what happened that January night in 2007 a miracle.
“Now I know that things really do happen for a reason,” Johnson said.
As for Tyquan Johnson, he was transferred to another hospital for surgery on his colon.
Today, he’s 18, a graduate of Bethel High School after he and his family moved to Hampton. Tyquan lived an active childhood, playing baseball, football and basketball.
“I don’t feel like nothing is really wrong,” Tyquan Johnson said. “I feel normal. I can do everything. I can jump, run, eat, sleep. … I can do everything a normal person would do. It definitely has changed my faith a lot because I’m destined to be in this world. If God didn’t want me in this world, He would just let me die on that table. But he wanted to give me a second chance.
That second chance at life will go to service. Tyquan Johnson wants to join the military and work in the computer field.
What does he want people to get from his experience?
“Give it patience,” he said. “Work hard. Strive for greatness and everything’s going to happen.”
One could say Father Valera is destined for greatness. Official recognition of this miracle by the Roman Catholic Church means he is on a path to possible sainthood.
And after that winter’s day in New England —
Miracles do happen.
The Johnson’s have each other.
“That’s all I get to say,” Leandra Johnson said, “that they do happen.”
For more information: https://www.causesanti.va/it/santi-e-beati/salvador-valera-parra.html
