Officer Excels on Baby Delivery Beat

PACOIMA —  The sign says LAPD, as in Los Angeles Prenatal and Delivery.

Los Angeles Police Department Officer Gabriel Ahedo has just delivered his second baby in two weeks in front of the Foothill Division station.

Late Thursday, Ahedo was working the front desk when a frantic Gilbert Godinez arrived and asked for help.

The 34-year-man told the rookie officer, “My wife’s outside in the car and she’s gonna have a baby,” Ahedo recalled.

He told his partner to call paramedics and rushed outside.

“The vehicle was parked the wrong way right in front of the station. The mom was in the back seat,” Ahedo said. “By the time we got there the baby’s head and shoulders had already started coming out.”

“I told him, ‘Get ready to get your son,’ and then the baby started coming out little by little, first the head, then the chest, and the knees and finally the little feet,” he said. Added Ahedo, a 26-year-old bachelor: “It was amazing.”

Even the second time.

Two weeks ago Ahedo assisted a 15-year-old girl who had put off telling anyone about the pregnancy until she was in labor. By the time she had arrived at the Foothill station, about 4 a.m., the baby was coming. She delivered in the ambulance en route to the hospital.

Ahedo visited the girl and her baby the next morning.

Now fellow officers have taken to calling Ahedo “doctor” and “godfather.”

Gilbert and Patricia Godinez were not expecting their baby until Dec. 12. When she went for a routine prenatal checkup earlier this week, the doctor had told the couple not to worry.

Even after her water broke Thursday night, Patricia Godinez didn’t see a reason to rush. Her first child, 19-month-old Megan, was born after several trips to the hospital and 12 hours of labor.

So Godinez took a shower while her husband slowly packed bags for their hospital stay. “We just didn’t think it was going to happen so fast,” Gilbert Godinez said.

But as her contractions deepened, she began to worry. The couple finally rushed to their minivan and started driving to Pacifica Hospital of the Valley, by then three hours after the first contractions.

They didn’t get far before the expectant mother began crying, “I feel it coming down.”

That’s when Gilbert Godinez saw the Foothill Division Police Station at Osborne Street and San Fernando Road. He pulled in and quickly parked.

By then, the baby’s head was showing.

“My daughter [Megan] was my labor coach. . . . She said, ‘Mama! Baby!’ ” Patricia Godinez said. “I was worried about her. I didn’t want her to see me in pain.”

The couple named their new son Gilbert Patrick--not “Osborne,” as some officers had suggested. He is healthy and weighs 7 pounds, 9 ounces.

After the delivery, police officers rushed out of the station with blankets and water. Paramedics arrived about five minutes later to cut the umbilical cord and rush the mother and infant to the hospital.

“These things happen periodically just because we’re so visible and in emergencies they’ll often turn to the police because they know we can get them help quickly,” LAPD spokesman Lt. Anthony Alba said. About six babies are born in vehicles on Los Angeles roads each year, Alba said.

LAPD cadets are taught emergency delivery procedures during their training.

“At the time I was thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be an officer with a gun, protecting the public from the bad guy,’ ” Ahedo said. “But when you’re out in the field you have to be a lot of things: a doctor, a lawyer, a counselor.”

The couple was not cited for parking illegally, he said.