PACOIMA : Officers Arrive Just in Time to Deliver Baby

Rebecca Richards’ baby seemed to arrive at the wrong place, at the wrong time--on the lawn outside her apartment building at 3:45 a.m. Monday.

There wasn’t a doctor or a paramedic within miles. To everyone’s luck, though, Los Angeles police officers Pete Cabunoc and Marty Ryan were there.

The two delivered Richards’ seven-pound daughter, untangling her umbilical cord from around her neck. Later, the baby and her mother were declared healthy by doctors at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Panorama City.

“I depended on the officers,” said Richards, 29, who is deaf. She went into labor about 1:30 a.m. and started calling friends and family, including the baby’s father, Oscar Hamilton, 33, who was in Arizona.

Hamilton told her: “I’m on my way home.”

Richards thought she had several hours to await the birth, but she was in for a surprise.

“I heard a lot of stories” about police delivering babies, a giddy Cabunoc said Monday afternoon. “But I didn’t think it was going to be me one of these days.”

The two officers were riding through Pacoima when they were asked to respond to a 911 call about 3:30 a.m. They arrived at the apartment building in the 12700 block of Paxton Street and then the dispatcher told them the details of the call.

“We received information . . . that she was female, that she was deaf and she was going to have a baby,” said Cabunoc, 37. “We just looked at each other and said ‘Oh, no.”’

The officers scaled the security gate and dashed to Richards’ apartment, where they found her surprisingly calm. Richards can read lips, and was able to understand the officers. The three walked outside to meet an ambulance that had been summoned, but as Richards walked across the lawn to sit on the sidewalk and wait, she started to give birth.

“It all happened so quick,” Richards said in an interview Monday morning, speaking in sign language through an interpreter. “Just one push.”

But the baby girl was tangled in her umbilical cord. Ryan unwrapped it, and her face began to get color.

The officers followed the ambulance to the hospital, and had several photographs taken of them and the mother and child.

Richards remained unfazed Monday. She said giving birth to her newest daughter--whom she said she will probably name Rashelle Maya Richards--was much easier than her first birth, when she was in labor for 14 hours.

“The best advice (for expectant mothers) is to come early to the hospital,” Richards said.

Said Cabunoc, “You see a lot of bad things, dead bodies and people hurting each other, and now you get to see the birth of life. . .That was the best thing in our careers.”