Paramedic delivers own baby in restaurant parking lot

Paul Dupree had taken his girlfriend, Erin Castro, to the hospital when she first started experiencing contractions, but Castro was sent home after being told the baby wasn’t ready to be born.

Once home, the contractions got worse, and the couple left for the hospital again. But the baby decided it wasn’t going another 15 minutes to get to the delivery room, so Dupree pulled off the highway and into the parking lot of a Jack in the Box and called 911.

“She told me, ‘I think the head is out,’ and I said, ‘Ohh my,’” Dupree told WSOC.

The 911 dispatcher helped guide Dupree through the delivery. Dupree, who has worked as a paramedic for two decades, had delivered two other babies during his career. He didn’t have medical equipment this time, though, and had to deliver the baby, whose umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, without help.

“We had to maneuver her a bit to get the cord untangled and once I got the cord untangled I used my shoestring to tie the cord off,” Dupree told the station.

The birth took only a few minutes, but the couple said the baby, named Harper Lynn, will have the story of a lifetime to tell, and the shoestring to prove it.

“Looking back, it was what was meant to be because her daddy got to deliver her,” Castro said.

There have been a spate of unusual deliveries that have gotten attention recently, including a baby delivered by her 9-year-old sister in Chicago after the girls’ mother went into labor at home.

In this case, too, the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. The girl said she knew what to do because of a medical TV show.

A few weeks later, a baby was born on a sled after a late-January snowstorm kept a Philadelphia couple from reaching their car in time to get to the hospital.

Contact Stephanie Grimes at sgrimes@reviewjournal.com. Find her on Twitter: @steph_grimes