Sharbot Lake OPP Officer Makes An Early Morning Catch

Jeff Green | Feb 13, 2014

OPP Constable Lori Lobinowich was just starting her day shift on a cold, dark Saturday morning last week when she received a call from the dispatch centre to tell her that a woman in labour was about to arrive at the detachment to meet an ambulance that was to take her to the Smiths Falls hospital.

Just then a car pulled into the parking lot of the detachment, which is located on Hwy. 7, near the junction with Road 38.

A little over a half an hour earlier, Cindy Thompson had woken up at her home on Burke Settlement Road, about a 15-minute winter's drive north of Sharbot Lake off Road 509. Her sixth child was two days late. She had been to see her doctor the day before and everything seemed fine; they were going to wait a few days for the baby to come.

“I felt pain, and then I realised it was labour pain, not the Brackston-Hicks contractions that I had been having, but real labour,” she recalled later.

She told her husband John it was time to go to the hospital, and got herself to the car. By the time he got there it was clear the labour was progressing pretty quickly.

They hadn’t yet reached Road 509 when John called 911.

Fifteen minutes later, Constable Lobinowich hustled out of the office to meet the car.

“The door opened and there was the baby,” she said later. “We had the paramedic on the line and he said to get the baby indoors. It was minus 15 that morning, so between John and I we somehow got Cindy and Kyra into the detachment.”

The logical place to bring them was the holding cell in the small detachment office, so that’s where they went.

Because of that the story of the baby "born in the jail cell" hit the national media early this week.

Within minutes some local firefighters arrived on the scene as first responders and then paramedics arrived at about 6:45. They cut the umbilical cord and made sure everything was in order before transferring Cindy and baby Kyra first to the Perth campus and finally to the Smiths Falls campus of the Great War Memorial Hospital where the regional obstetrics ward is located.

The next morning, Cindy and Kyra (whose second name is Winter and who weighed over 9 lb. at birth, for the record) went home to join brothers Aaron (15) Tyee (11) Marshal (6) and sisters Nadie (4) and Aurora (almost 3).

“That will be all for us,” said John Davis.

Constable Lobinowich was working the day shift this week, so on Tuesday morning Cindy, John and Kyra had a much more relaxed visit to the detachment to take some photos for scrapbooks and present the baby to the detachment staff. Kyra slept through the whole visit, flash photos and all.

Cindy took the opportunity to thank Lori Lobinowich again.

“I was just glad I was able to help,” said Lobinowich.