A 3-year-old boy turned blue and nearly stopped breathing when his neck became caught in an electric car window, the rescuers say.
The boy had apparently been playing in the vehicle parked in the driveway of his family's home in Heriot, Otago, when the incident occurred just after noon yesterday.
"Somehow he pushed the window and it's come up and cut his airway off,'' Heriot Volunteer Fire Brigade chief fire officer Murray Young said.
His mother found him and called 111. If she had been much longer the boy may have have died, Mr Young said.
"We responded - the fire station is just across the road - and when we got there he was unconscious, quite blue, and he was breathing but only just.
