Listen to the call here: 911 Call. Editor's note: The address of the couple's home and Josh Mathon's cell phone number were edited out of this recording by newspaper staff.

by Josh Lanier



Carrie Mathon woke her husband Josh from a sound sleep in the wee hours of March 22. “It’s time,” she told him. The couple’s second child was on the way.

Contractions had started earlier that night but escalated quickly – jumping from one-minute-long bursts seven minutes apart to only two minutes between contractions.

Josh Mathon woke up quickly and flew through their Cornelius home, packing his wife’s hospital bags and waking up his in-laws to rush to Presbyterian Hospital Huntersville. But Carrie’s water broke on the way out the door of their Caldwell Station home, and by the she got into his Toyota Tundra truck, it was too late.

“I can’t go anywhere,” she screamed to Josh Mathon. “You’re going to need to deliver this baby.”

Carrie Mathon wanted her second childbirth to happen naturally. Her first, with her now 2 1/2-year-old son, Cody, was born after doctors induced labor.

Although already at full term, Carrie Mathon’s doctors told her a week before she gave birth to a healthy baby girl in her driveway that she was still a “few weeks” away from delivery.

“I wasn’t expecting to deliver so soon. I spent that morning having a nice relaxing day,” she recalled.

She took a weight-lifting class in the morning and spent the afternoon with her parents, who’d came to provide support.

A stomach ache kept her up that night, so she stayed downstairs to upload photos to Facebook while the family went to bed.

“Then it just started,” she said.

The first contraction came around 2 a.m. A trained nurse, she knew they were still too far apart to call the hospital. So she didn’t wake her husband immediately.

“I wanted him to sleep,” she said. “I wanted at least one of us to be sane in case we were about to have a baby.”

Carrie Mathon dozed off in and out of the contractions – a minute long, seven minutes apart, she kept count – for nearly three hours.

But then the contractions jumped to only two minutes apart. She rushed upstairs to wake up her husband.

As he was packing the truck to go to the hospital, Carrie’s water broke as she walked out of the house with her mom.

“That’s when I realized things were happening faster than we’d really ever imagined,” he said.

Baby Chloe’s delivery room would be the front seat of her dad’s truck.

Josh Mathon called 911, which sent paramedics, but operators walked him through what would need to be done right away.

“Grab some towels and a shoestring,” the operator told him. Carrie’s dad ran in the house, ripping a shoestring from his dress shoes and grabbing some towels on his way out.

They undressed Carrie in the driveway.

“Can you see the head?” the MEDIC dispatcher asked.

He couldn’t, but before he could say anything else, the baby began to crown.

“I could see just the very top of her head starting to come through,” he said. “I handed the phone to my father-in-law, and by the time I turned back around I had to catch (my daughter).

“… I just reacted,” he said.

Chloe Mathon was born a healthy 7 pounds 10 ounces.

“I thank God she was born head first and didn’t need suction,” Josh Mathon said. “I don’t know what we would have done then.”

He cradled his daughter for the first time in a towel, tied off the umbilical cord with the shoelace and handed her to his wife moments before paramedics arrived. The entire scene lasted about 10 minutes, Carrie Mathon said.

“It was just this amazing scene,” she said. “Everything just happened so fast, and Josh handled everything perfectly.”

Josh Mathon, associate director of admissions for Art Institute of Charlotte, downplayed the heroics.

Carrie’s uncle said the proud papa deserved the Golden Glove Award, given to baseball players for excellence in fielding, for catching Chloe after she was born.

“Chloe already has her daddy wrapped around her finger,” Carrie Mathon joked. “She instantly became a daddy’s girl after that night.”

Josh Mathon agreed:

“Yeah, she’s going to have this over me for the rest of her life. But that’s OK though. I don’t mind at all.”