Two Moms Are 'Heroes' After East Hampton Police Officer Delivers Baby

“Have you ever done this before?” Cody Vichinsky asked East Hampton Town Police Officer Grace Peterson as the two knelt next to each other on Vichinsky’s front porch.

“From the other side,” Officer Peterson responded, “twice.”

The pair were kneeling next to Vichinsky’s wife, Lauren, each holding one of her legs. Lauren Vichinsky was about to give birth to the couple’s second daughter — right there on the porch.

A few minutes earlier on Wednesday evening, April 20, Peterson had been in her patrol car deep in Northwest Woods, assisting a woman who had fallen and broken her arm, when a call came in that a woman was going into labor.

The 19-year veteran sprinted to the house in Hardscrabble, pulling in to find Lieutenant Daniel Toia putting an oxygen mask on Lauren Vichinsky, who was on all fours on the front porch, in agony.

“She was crying and timing her contractions with her phone — they were about two minutes apart — and she told me she had the urge to push,” a clear signal that mothers are intimately familiar with, Peterson recalled on Thursday, April 21. “It was her second child, so she knew that things were moving quickly. I could tell by her face that we were going to have that baby.”

Police officers are shown a video on assisting with childbirth when they are in the training academy. For Peterson, that was 19 years ago, and that is the extent of the training for such situations they get.

East Hampton Town Police Chief Michael Sarlo said that in his 27 years on the force, he could not recall an officer fully delivering a baby.

But motherly instincts kick in quickly in tense moments, Peterson said, and the men who were there on Wednesday evening say the mother of two daughters immediately took charge.

“Grace, it was like she’d done it a million times,” Toia said. “I asked her, ‘When the hell did you get an M.D.?’ She put on an outstanding performance. I’m really glad she was there.”

While Toia and Officer Jake Bramwell eased the mother-to-be onto her back, Peterson started undressing her and sent Cody Vichinsky to gather towels and blankets and pillows and bring them to the porch. There was no time to move her.

“She was in the zone, instinctively. She was directing everybody, and you could see she was thinking about each step ahead of anyone else,” Cody Vichinsky recalled on Thursday, from Stony Brook University Hospital, where his wife and new daughter, Isabelle, are doing well.

That outcome wasn’t always assured.

With Vichinsky and Peterson each holding a leg, Lauren Vichinsky started to push, and the baby came out quickly. But as the head became visible, something was clearly wrong.

“The head popped out, and she was blue as a Smurf,” Cody Vichinsky recounted. “She wasn’t breathing. The umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck.”

Another push from Lauren Vichinsky, and Isabelle popped out and Peterson acted quickly.

“It was scary,” she said. “The umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, and I could see fluid in her nose and mouth. I unwrapped the cord and was able to flip her over, and I put my fingers in her mouth and cleared out the fluid. And Cody got something, a suction thing, from the house, and was able to clear out her nose.

“Then I heard her cry. I wanted to hear that cry so desperately.”

It was 7:07 p.m. — about 40 minutes after Cody Vichinsky had arrived home, and 35 minutes after his wife, who was 35 weeks pregnant, had first said she was suddenly feeling a twinge of contractions.

The couple had scrambled to gather things to head to the hospital, but the contractions were intensifying and gathering speed much faster than with the couple’s first experience 18 months earlier.

“We’re walking out the door, and she stopped, and next thing I knew she was on all fours in agony and couldn’t move — it suddenly got very real,” Cody Vichinsky recalled.

Only a handful of minutes later, color came to Isabelle’s face and her cries got stronger. Peterson and the baby’s father wrapped her in a towel and put her on her mother’s belly for skin-to-skin contact, then draped the pair in heavy blankets to ward off the cold evening — just as EMTs pulled in the driveway.

Peterson said she felt like it was then when she took her first breath since she’d gotten out of her car.

“It was very intense,” she said. “I didn’t think about it until later, but things could have gone way wrong.”

Cody Vichinsky heaped praise on Peterson, Toia and Bramwell for keeping their cool in a very stressful moment, keeping him and his wife calm — he’d been picturing himself driving with a police escort through evening traffic; his wife had asked Peterson if she’d had an epidural — and, of course, potentially saving their new daughter’s life.

“Without those officers, I don’t think my daughter would be alive,” he said. “Officer Peterson, in our house, will always be a hero.”

But Peterson says the credit should go to the one who did the real work.

“Lauren was the hero on that porch. I’m just happy I was there to be able to assist her,” Peterson said.

She added, “Mother’s Day should definitely be a full week.”