RIVERDALE, Md. — A pregnant woman from Riverdale gave birth in a minivan along busy East-West Highway, with a little help from a Prince George’s County police officer.
The father, Carlos Sura, flagged down Sgt. Nick Cicale in University Park Thursday night.
The couple had been trying to get to Providence Hospital but didn’t make it.
“This one is not in the training manual,” said Cicale, who has been on the force for 19 and a half years but never delivered a baby before. “I was scared.”
On top of that, the couple only speaks a little English, and Cicale only speaks a little Spanish.
The mother, Sara Granados, was sitting in the back of the van, and he tried to make her comfortable by reclining her seat.
“I held her hand, I told her the best I could that everything was going to be OK, and no sooner than I said that, she had one good contraction where she kind of reared up on the seat,” Cicale said.
“And no sooner than she come down on the seat, I saw the baby’s head. I literally caught
the baby as he came.”
The mother was also scared. Acting as a translator for Granados, police Cpl. Juan Damian said, “At some point, they lost control of the baby, and she thought the baby died.”
But what baby Carlos did next made everyone feel better.
“What felt like an eternity was probably four to five seconds, and he started letting out his first cries. So I don’t know if I started crying louder or if he started crying louder at that point,” Cicale joked.
The father took the shirt off his back in order to have something to wrap the baby in until paramedics arrived and took the mother and baby to Prince George’s Hospital Center.
Both parents are back home and doing fine.
“She was very glad that they came up and helped her out,” Damian said of Granados. “This is the first time she got an experience … with a police officer [who] helped them out that way.”
