Police From All Over Rally To Lift Spirits Of North Texas Child Battling Cancer – CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

Watch JD Miles’ report on CBS 11 at 10 a.m. It will be posted here after it airs.

IRVING, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) – Police officers are supposed to be there when you need them and they certainly were for a 6 year old Irving boy.

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They answered the call and helped a sick child beat cancer.

When he insisted on wearing a police suit every day for a week, it became clear from an early age what Bennett Hernandez wanted to be when he grew up.

“Because I can take bad guys and beat them up and take them to jail,” Bennett said.

But in the summer, the child’s dreams of becoming a police officer were put on hold.

“And I came home and I looked at it that day, and I said, ‘Oh my God,’ that was on his right side, just a huge, huge lump,” said Bennett’s mom, Raynie Hernandez.

That lump in Bennett’s neck turned out to be cancer.

“You hear cancer and you immediately think of the worst,” Raynie said.

Weeks of chemotherapy in the Children’s Medical Center soon followed.

At the time, Jerry Rhodes, a retired Dallas officer, messaged departments everywhere asking for police patches to cheer Bennett up.

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“There was a day when he had 22 packages in the mail.”

Patches, hats, shirts, blankets came in every day.

Bennett Hernandez (credit: JD Miles – CBS 11)

“It really helped to distract him a lot of the letters that I think people wrote him about the cancer they’ve had,” Raynie said.

The response was so overwhelming that Bennett and his parents still don’t have time to go through everything.

Care packages from hundreds of police stations, some even from Ireland.

Now, thanks to his medical care and support from law enforcement around the world, Bennett called at Children’s after his latest treatment left him cancer-free.

“That was really a moment of euphoria to see how excited he got,” said Fernan Hernandez, Bennett’s father.

Bennett can be a boy again now.

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And when his dreams change, they often change, at least he will always have a memory of the time his blue friends were there for him.