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By Emilie Raguso
The Modesto Bee
MODESTO, Calif. — Two police officers spent part of their Labor Day shift assisting a woman in labor, helping her deliver a healthy baby boy in a parked car near Doctors Medical Center.
“I’ve been out on shots fired calls, no problem,” officer Steve Anderson, an eight-year veteran of the Modesto Police Department, said today. “But this one actually made me a little shaky. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
About 11 a.m. Monday, Anderson and officer Ben Kroutil were driving south on McHenry Avenue. They were stopped at a red light at Orangeburg Avenue when a man stopped on the other side of the intersection jumped out of his car to flag them down.
“I rolled my window down and he said, ‘My wife’s having a baby,’ ” Anderson said. “It was serious. He was frantic.”
The officers directed the man, Jose Blanco, to get back into his car and drive into the parking lot of a nearby Chevron station. As they pulled into the lot, Kroutil pulled on rubber gloves.
They opened the man’s passenger side door and saw Brenda Resendes, 26, in a fully reclined front seat. Her pants were off. The officers said she appeared “panicky and scared,” holding in her hands the head and shoulders of Jesus, her newborn baby. The delivery was almost complete.
“All that was left was the ankles,” said Kroutil. The baby was born moments later. Anderson cleared Jesus’ airway by sweeping his gloved finger through the baby’s mouth. Kroutil rubbed Jesus’ tiny chest to stimulate his breathing. Blanco, 31, took off his shirt so the officers could use it to clean and wrap the baby.
Firefighters arrived soon afterward. They gave scissors to Jose Blanco so he could cut his son’s umbilical cord. They also gave him a shirt to wear. As he put it on, the shock of the afternoon began to wear off.
“That’s when it all set in, and I started crying,” he said today, sitting on the edge of a hospital bed as his wife held their son in a nearby rocking chair. The couple’s 6-year-old daughter, Xitlali, sat between them.
“I’m just grateful to the firefighters and police,” he said. “If it wasn’t for them, I really wouldn’t have known what to do.”
Copyright 2008 The Modesto Bee