A sheriff’s deputy who has been unconscious since being shot by the Baton Rouge cop killer on Sunday squeezed the hand of a family member when she told him: “We need you.”

Nicholas Tullier, 41, responded when given the message by his family who have not left his bedside since he was shot in the stomach and the back of the head on Sunday morning.

Tullier, a father of two teenage boys, is in “very, very critical condition” and doctors are using a ventilator to keep him breathing.

Relative Carol McManus told Daily Mail Online that the family “needs prayers more than anything.”

She said: “All of his close family are at the hospital and they are not leaving him.

They were telling him: ‘I need you’ when he squeezed their hand. He's still with us, he can hear us.”

Tullier, an East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Deputy, was one of three law enforcement officers who were wounded by 29-year-old Gavin Long during an attack in the Louisiana capital, which also left three officers dead.