The unnamed nurse screamed into the phone at the 911 dispatcher: “The baby’s turning blue! Baby’s turning blue!” She urged the paramedics to come faster. “We’re not prepared for this.”

In most cases, a patient going into labor at a healthcare facility in a room full of nurses would be a stressful but manageable situation.

But the 29-year-old new mother at the center of the crisis unfolding at Hacienda HealthCare a few days after Christmas was a special – and especially dangerous – case: She had been in a persistent vegetative state since 1992.

“One of the patients just had a baby, and we had no idea she was pregnant,” the nurse said.

The 911 call, released by Phoenix police and obtained by ABC affiliate KNXV, provides a window into the birth that has rocked the city and the nonprofit healthcare organization that has taken care of the medically fragile for five decades.

The infant, who was delivered by a Hacienda HealthCare nurse, was successfully resuscitated and was being cared for at a hospital with his mother, who also remains in good health. The baby will be taken in by family, the news station reported.

Police and the facility are trying to identify the man responsible for the sexual assault on a vulnerable adult.

Hacienda “will accept nothing less than a full accounting of this absolutely horrifying situation, an unprecedented case that has devastated everyone involved, from the victim and her family to Hacienda staff at every level of our organization,” Gary Orman, a member of Hacienda’s board of directors, said in the statement.

That “full accounting” is ongoing. Hacienda’s chief executive, Bill Timmons, resigned last week. And police have obtained warrants to compel Hacienda’s male staff members to give DNA samples.


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