Her parents Erika and Harry Ostapowicz, from Springfield, were already on the way to the hospital.
A frantic Harry rushed into the Akron-Canton Foodbank parking lot to call for help.
“I kept asking the 911 dispatch if they were coming,” Harry said, describing the experience. “Are they coming?, Are they on their way. I don’t hear them. Her water just broke. Where are they? Oh my god, I can’t believe this is happening.”
But little Kendal couldn’t wait any longer.
“She had a different plan,” Erika said. “So we got about half-way there, and I told him that I was ready to push. He told me I wasn’t allowed to push. He told me, ‘You can’t push.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I need to push.’”
With her tiny 19-inch body sprawled out in the parking lot, little Erika arrived in a matter of minutes.
“You could hear mom. It was all happening so fast,” said Daniel Flowers, CEO of the Akron-Canton Foodbank. “We had a group of cheering foodbank staff members while this woman gave birth to her baby in her Ford Explorer.”
Flowers said he hopes the family will revisit the place their child was born, a place located on Opportunity Parkway.
“Maybe when the baby grows up, they can seek a position at the foodbank and say,” it was the job they were born to do,” Flowers he laughed. “That’s our little joke.”
Kendal, Erika and Harry are expected to head home tomorrow. Her three-year-old brother is anxiously awaiting their arrival.