(The following story by Edgar Sandoval and Bill Hutchinson appeared on the New York Daily News website on June 12, 2009.)
NEW YORK — It wasn’t rush hour, but a baby that subway conductor Bretta Sykes delivered on an R train Thursday was in a big hurry.
The baby girl couldn’t wait for her parents to reach the maternity ward, so Sykes stepped in as midwife.
“The baby is coming!” yelled the Brooklyn mother, whose water broke as she and her fiancé headed from their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant to the Queens hospital where the mom had planned to give birth.
“I did not want to cut the umbilical cord. I’m a conductor. I only push buttons,” joked Sykes, a mother of two grown children.
The unexpected delivery happened at the Whitehall station in lower Manhattan, just hours after Sykes’ 29-year-old daughter, Fortune, had told her she was going to have a baby.
“A few hours later, I was delivering one,” Sykes said.
Sykes, a 16-year MTA veteran, was waiting on the platform to begin her W train route when she heard a commotion on an R train that had entered the station and went to investigate.
Surrounded by concerned straphangers, the young mother was splayed on the floor of the car in obvious labor, Sykes said.
Sykes ordered the crowd to back off and told the mother-to-be, “Just try to breathe.”
As MTA colleague Tyrone Cloud, 54, kept the crowd at bay, Sykes called out for a doctor.
When no one stepped forward, the CPR training Sykes had gotten in her previous career as a correction officer and the birthing classes she had taken long ago kicked in.
“You hear about this happening to firefighters and cabbies, but you never think it’s going to happen to you,” Sykes said.
As soon as she pulled the mom’s jeans down, Sykes knew she wouldn’t have the luxury of waiting for paramedics.
“I saw the baby’s head,” said Sykes, of Westbury, L.I.
Sykes pulled off her jacket, caught the infant with it and wrapped her in it. “She looked okay to me,” she said of the newborn. “I had tears in my eyes.”
Someone asked what time it was. When a passerby yelled 1:25p.m., the gathered crowd started applauding.
The baby and her parents, whose names were not immediately available, were resting at New York Downtown Hospital.
Toshiana McCray, who was visiting a relative at the hospital, said she spoke to the father, who was “ecstatic.” She said the father told her the baby was born a month premature but healthy.
Before leaving the scene, the father told Sykes he wanted to name the baby after her.
“I told him, ‘I don’t know if the world is big enough for two Brettas,'” Sykes said.