A pair of New York City cops safely delivered a baby boy near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel Monday morning after his mother suddenly went into labor inside a car.
The two Port Authority Police officers got to the car at the toll plaza on the New Jersey side of the tunnel just before 9 a.m. on Monday, in the middle of morning rush hour traffic on the busy bridge.
Nestor Guallpa, the baby’s father, stopped the vehicle about three or four cars before the toll when his wife started bleeding, he said. He flagged down an officer and begged him to help her.
“I said, ‘Please, please, please, help me, help me, because my wife, I think is going to have a baby because my wife is bleeding and I see the baby is there,'” Guallpa said.
Maria Marin’s baby boy was crowning by the time Officer Timothy Jozefczyk arrived on the scene. He had never assisted with a delivery before and does not have any children of his own yet, but he relied on his training to help Marin.
“I put my hands near the baby’s head,” the officer told local outlet WABC-TV. “I instructed, ‘Keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing.'”
The baby boy was born about three minutes later a healthy six pounds, nine ounces.
Monday was also Officer Jozefczyk’s first time even holding a newborn, although he hopes to become a father someday.
“I was so relieved when the baby cried and so happy that everyone is healthy,” he said.
Shortly afterward, Officer Evan Butt, a former EMT with the FDNY, arrived to help Jozefczyk clamp the umbilical cord.
“They’re our heroes,” said Guallpa, the father. “It was like something out of a movie, and I will never forget this experience.”
“Seeing the officers work carefully and knew what they were doing was amazing,” he said. “It was, like, incredible! Incredible! I said he was an angel.”
Marin and her newborn were transported to Hoboken University Medical Center.
On Wednesday, the officers paid a visit at the hospital to the parents and the baby they helped deliver, who his parents named Kylian Aaron Guallpa Castano.
Photos from the happy reunion show the smiling mom sitting in her hospital bed with a balloon to celebrate her new baby boy, while one of the officers holds Kylian in a chair next to her and smiles at the newborn.
“Nothing compares to the real thing,” Officer Jozefczyk, a nine-year police veteran, said. “You can teach it on a screen all you want, but once when you’re there, it’s a totally different experience.”
Police in the New York City area find themselves assisting with emergency births every so often. For Officer Butt, he had assisted with four previous births before Monday’s emergency birth.
More than 200,000 babies are born in New York City every year, although that rate has been declining in recent years.
Since Kylian could not wait until he got through the Lincoln Tunnel, he will be one of the about 100,000 yearly births in New Jersey.
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