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Lt. Jason Short believed he was about to save a life.

A 911 call – someone had spotted a baby left alone in a car on a hot July day – prompted the police officer to rush to the Walmart shopping plaza in Keene, N.H. There, just as the call had said, he spied an infant in a car: a blanket, a bottle and finally two bare feet, motionless, emerging from beneath the fabric.

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He drew his baton, smashed the window and saved the child.

Something was wrong. He described the infant as appearing lifeless or dead. Short began administering CPR. It did not work. He called for an ambulance, and then he checked for an obstructed airway.

“And I went to put my finger in its mouth and it was all resistance,” he said to WMUR-TV. “And I’m like, ‘This is a doll.'” He called the ambulance again, to relay its services were no longer needed.

The doll, as it turned out, belonged to a Vermont resident named Carolynne Seiffert. That the figure was so realistic was not a mistake. Seiffert, whose 20-year-old son died in 2005 from Hunter’s disease, collects lifelike dolls as a form of coping with the loss. She owns about 40 of them.