One moment Michael Fumiatti was chasing a quad driver who tried to run him down Tuesday evening — then moments later found himself helping bring a baby boy into the world.
All on his first hour on the beat.
It wasn’t a typical night in New Haven. Even for a cop.
Paul Bass Photo
Fumiatti (pictured), a third-generation New Haven police officer who started on the force last October, began a walking shift at 6 p.m. at the Church Street South housing complex.
He and fellow officer Matthew Stevens spotted a young man tearing through the complex on a quad. The man drove straight at Fumiatti.
“He tried to run me over,” Fumiatti said later in the evening.
Fumiatti stepped out of the way. He and Stevens succeeded in stopping the quad and pulling off the driver. The driver bolted. Fumiatti and Stevens ran after him. They caught him.
Back-up officers arrived with a cruiser. Fumiatti put the arrestee, handcuffed, in the back seat. Fumiatti was waiting to have the arrestee transported to the lock-up when a driver pulled up in a grey Pathfinder SUV. A man jumped out of the SUV and ran up to Fumiatti.
“This woman’s water broke! She’s having a baby!” the man cried.
Fumiatti, who’s 26, had never delivered a baby before. (Nor is he a dad yet.) He figured the woman probably had time to get to the hospital before delivering, anyway.
Then he looked inside the SUV and saw a baby’s head appear.
“Oh boy,” Fumiatti thought to himself. “Here we go. This is the real deal.”
The mother’s sister-in-law, Wailany Castillo, was handling the baby as it came out. Fumiatti put on his gloves to assist. So did fellow Officer Joseph Galvan, a rookie who graduated from the police academy this August.
Just then, Police Chief Dean Esserman and Assistant Chief Thaddeus Reddish happened to be driving by. They saw lights flashing from the police cruiser. They heard screams from inside the SUV. They figured officers were involved in a fight. They pulled over to assist.
“Chief!” an officer cried out. “They’re having a baby!”
“This is going to be baby number nine for you,” Reddish told Esserman, who has delivered eight in his life.
Before the chiefs got to the car, an officer cried: “The baby’s out!”
Fumiatti removed his jacket to give to the mother, Kayla Curvelo, who is 24 years old. The man who had originally jumped out of the SUV to alert the cops (Castillo’s cousin) took off his jacket, too, to wrap the baby. Fumiatti and Galvan made sure the baby’s lungs were clear. Then they had the car’s heat turned up to maximum. Meanwhile, firefighter-medics were on the way.
When they arrived, they clamped the baby boy’s umbilical cord. Then they took the baby into an ambulance-style box truck to transport him to Yale-New Haven Hospital. A driver of a separate ambulance arrived to transport the mother.
Later, at the hospital, Castillo reported that mom and baby were doing fine. She said the baby, Curvelo’s fifth, has not yet been named.
Officers Galvin and Fumiatti “did a great job,” Castillo said.
Esserman said he felt “privileged to witness the New Haven police and the New Haven firefighters bring New Haven’s newest baby into the world this evening. In the middle of a snowstorm, they honored their oath. They were beautiful. They were compassionate. And they were expert in what they were doing.”
“It made me feel so good,” Reddish declared afterwards, “I gave a homeless guy five bucks.”
Michael Fumiatti, meanwhile, returned to the beat. His 6 p.m. shift was only one hour old.
Fumiatti, the nephew of late police Officer Robert Fumiatti and the grandson of retired cop Vincent Fumiatti, hit the streets as a newly minted cop late last year.
“This was definitely the most rewarding thing I’ve done” so far, he said Tuesday evening. “One minute we get in a chase and arrest somebody, and the next we deliver a baby. By 7 o’clock.”
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