‘Freeway Baby’ Beats CHP to Scene : Oxnard: Newborn is delivered in a car alongside highway, just minutes ahead of two arriving patrolmen.

If the CHP officers had arrived any earlier, they might have handed the squalling newborn a speeding ticket.

But the little son of Fernando and Maria Guadalupe Covarrubias was too quick for them. He vroomed from the womb about five minutes before Officers George Orozco and Richard Rosales arrived in response to the father’s frantic call from a freeway call box.

The Covarrubias’ third child was born about 3 a.m. Friday in a cramped compact car on the shoulder of the northbound Ventura Freeway near the Rose Avenue off-ramp in Oxnard.

Cradling the newborn Friday afternoon in her room at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, an exhausted Maria Covarrubias said she and her husband haven’t decided on a name for their healthy 8-pound, 2-ounce son.

So for now authorities have just tagged him the “freeway baby.”

Maria Covarrubias said she began having contractions one minute apart at the couple’s Moorpark home early Friday.

She told her husband, and the couple and their two small children piled into a friend’s compact car to race to the Ventura County Medical Center in Ventura about 2:20 a.m.

They got on the Moorpark Freeway, then switched to the Ventura Freeway. Maria Covarrubias said she kept telling her husband to hurry, the baby was coming. She said he was driving 70 to 75 m.p.h. But that was nothing compared to their little speed demon.

Finally, Fernando Covarrubias pulled over to the shoulder and rushed to the call box to summon help. The California Highway Patrol described him as “panic-stricken.”

“He was more nervous than me,” Maria Covarrubias said Friday afternoon.

While her husband was on the phone, she gave birth unassisted in the front passenger seat. She said their daughter and son--Maribel, 5, and Iban, 3--were asleep in the back and only awoke when their new brother began wailing.

Officers Orozco and Rosales arrived five minutes later to find the baby already in his mother’s arms. They provided a paper blanket to wrap him in and escorted the family to St. John’s.

Later Friday morning, the CHP media line reported the “happy occasion,” instead of the usual grim details on car crashes.

CHP spokeswoman Staci Morse said freeway births are rare in Ventura County--she said she hasn’t heard of one in years.

Maria Covarrubias disclosed Friday she had taken a less exciting trip to the hospital about 11 a.m. Wednesday, believing she was going into labor, but doctors at Ventura County Medical Center sent her home about two hours later.

Asked whether she planned to have any other children in light of Friday’s ordeal, the sleepless mother cracked a smile.

“ Ya no, “ she declared in Spanish. Definitely not.

Times staff photographer Carlos Chavez contributed to this story.