Officers Rescue Newborn Baby from Toilet

Officers Rescue Newborn Baby from Toilet
BY Liz Townsend

Police officers in Littleton, Colorado, saved the life of a tiny unborn baby who was delivered into a toilet three months prematurely. Little Nevaeh (heaven spelled backwards) was saved from drowning and revived, and the officers and paramedics who rescued her have been named the baby's godparents.

"She's going to probably be shocked that this is how she came into the world," her mother Salina Newman told reporters, according to Rocky Mountain News.

Newman, 22, was six months pregnant February 7 when she woke up in pain and went into the bathroom. The baby slipped out into the toilet, still completely enclosed in the amniotic sac. Newman thought the baby was dead, Rocky Mountain News reported.

She made a frantic call to the Littleton Police Department. "I need an ambulance. I just had a baby," Newman told the 911 operator, according to The Denver Channel. "I was only six months pregnant and I went to the restroom and I think (the baby) is in the toilet."

Officers Bob Carmody, Al Quintana, and Nick Dimitric responded to the call. "I looked in the toilet bowl and I could see movement, and the baby was enclosed in the amniotic sac and everything," Carmody told The Denver Channel.

Carmody picked up the baby, still in the sac, and placed her on a blanket. "I could see the hair, the hands up by the face, and parts of the legs and stuff, but I didn't take a lot of time to look at it," he said. "I just made sure and covered up the blanket."

Quintana took the baby and ran down three flights to paramedic Dave Petau, Littleton fire Lt. Alan Henson, and firefighters Brian Cronin, Daryl Heppler, and Bob Saffron, who had just arrived outside the apartment building, the Denver Post reported. They removed Nevaeh from the sac and attached an oxygen tube, and she began breathing on her own.

Nevaeh was taken to Littleton Hospital, weighing only 1 pound, 5 ounces, according to a Littleton Police Department press release. She will remain in the hospital until she weighs 6 pounds.

"We're emotionally tied to her now," Quintana said, according to Rocky Mountain News. "To see her alive, that's the gift. To see her fighting--one of the nurses told me she's a pistol."