2 ‘Storks’ in Blue Show They ‘Serve’--and Deliver Too

On the side of each Los Angeles Police Department patrol car are the words “to protect and to serve.”

To Michael Baker and Thomas Small’s car, they can now add “. . . and we deliver.”

The two officers, both 34-year-old bachelors, were responding to a call about a raucous pre-dawn party Wednesday but wound up delivering a baby in the front seat of an Oldsmobile in the middle of 3rd Street.

“My first impulse was to go boil water,” Baker said. “Other than we knew we had a baby in our hands, we didn’t know much about it.”

“It’s one thing to see something in a movie,” including police training films, Small said. “But to actually be there, it is like a miracle.”

As far as Yeong Bak was concerned, the miracle was finding the two officers.

When his wife, Kyung, unexpectedly began labor before 4 a.m., he sped her frantically toward a hospital.

Small and Baker had just paused at 3rd and Berendo streets, looking for the noisy party, when the Olds “screeched on the brakes,” Small said.

As the near-hysterical Bak ran toward them, they saw a woman’s hand rise weakly from the front seat.

“Gunshot (victim) that’s the first thing that ran through our minds,” Small said.

But when the officers yanked open the door and Kyung Bak’s legs began slipping off the seat, they could see the baby emerging.

“Our main concern was this baby was going to come out and fall into the street,” Baker said.

But the child was “tangled up in all the (mother’s) clothes,” Small said, so he leaned above her and Baker crouched below, struggling to “get her clothes off her to get at this baby.”

“The father was trying to cover her up at the same time,” Baker said.

“It was no time to be modest,” Small said.

In moments, the infant “appeared in all his glory,” Small said, “and I wound up sort of catching him . . . like in a catcher’s mitt.”

But the newborn boy lay limp and bluish.

“The father kept bugging us, what’s wrong, what’s wrong, the baby isn’t crying,” Baker said. “He was right, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

Pushed Down

Small wiped mucus from the newborn’s mouth and tilted him back, and Baker said he “started tapping it lightly on the rear and kind of pushing down on the chest with my fingertips, like tiny little CPR.” Then Small blew a couple of quick, tiny puffs of air into the child’s mouth.

“Apparently that startled him enough,” Small said. “I noticed his eyes opened; all of a sudden he let out with a yelp.”

“I tell you,” Baker said, “we took a big sigh of relief.”

Arriving paramedics had only to cut the umbilical cord and put mother and child into the ambulance for Queen of Angels Hospital, where both were doing well, although the baby was chilled from his outdoor debut.

As the ambulance left, the new father ran up to the patrol car, gasped out his thanks and tossed a big wad of $20 bills, apparently several hundred dollars, into Small’s lap.

“I said, ‘We appreciate this but we can’t take this,’ ” Small said.

He turned to his partner and asked, “Hey, Mike, what are we gonna do with this?”

Grabbed Bankroll

Baker knew. He grabbed the bankroll and sprinted down the street after Bak, yelling, “Sir, sir, we can’t take this, we’ll go to jail!” Small chuckled.

Baker pleaded with Bak, saying, “No, no, take them back, we’ll get fired for this,”

“I tried to convince him as well as I could that it’s not the custom here,” he said.

Bak said he didn’t want anyone to “misunderstand.”

“It was beyond their job,” said the Pacific Bell employee, who believed that he was just showing “kindness. But they didn’t take it because that’s their regulations, right?”

But there might be a different reward for the midwives in blue.

When the boy grows up, Small figures wistfully, “maybe he’ll want to be a cop.”