Jazmin Quijano went into labor far sooner than expected. The 26-year-old from Stockton had been pregnant for just 22 weeks of the normal nine-month term. At 9 p.m. on June 21, she went to the St. Joseph’s Hospital in Stockton knowing her unborn child’s life was in the balance.
Hours went by, Quijano said, before she realized she wouldn’t be admitted and she was forced to look for care elsewhere. Quijano got in the car with the father of the child and headed north on Highway 99 toward Sacramento. At roughly 2 a.m., and 10 minutes away from downtown Sacramento, the baby was born while the car was pulled over on the side of the road.
“It was scary,” Quijano said Wednesday. “What happens if you don’t survive? Because she wasn’t crying. She wasn’t even moving at all.”
The baby was unresponsive. But 911 had been called and the authorities were en route.
“When we arrived, the baby had no pulse and was not breathing,” said Sacramento firefighter Andrienne Bisharat, who was among the group of first responders. “So we had to start CPR. So we grabbed the baby from mom, and then three of us jumped into the back of the ambulance and drove to UC Davis (hospital) with the baby under CRP the whole time.”