Behrend’s baby: Asher Brewer

By Toby Keller, news editor
trk5052@psu.edu

Asher Behrend Brewer, a five-month-old boy from Harborcreek, bears the University’s namesake because it “would be appropriate to include something about Asher’s unusual birth in his name,” said his father, Nathan Brewer. The father delivered his wife’s son as she lay reclined in the passenger seat of their car, which was parked in the center median of the Bayfront Connector.

It occurred in front of campus some 20 minutes after midnight on New Year’s Eve. The couple selected the baby’s middle name in honor of the campus next to which he was born.

His wife, Kathy, already a mother of three, had been timing her contractions throughout the day. Seven minutes, down to five, then three. The progression lead the experienced couple to believe, perhaps, birth was near, but it wasn’t until 11:30 p.m. that “the contractions really got going” and they made provisions to get to the hospital and care for the children.

“People asked, ‘how did you do it, weren’t you scared?’” said Brewer, thinking back to the panicked moments before the couple left the house. “As I was grabbing a couple towels and Kathy’s bag to go, that’s when I felt the most nervous. I felt my knees shake and I was praying the Lord would slow things down, because it was moving a bit too fast!”

Still, they assembled a “go bag” and rushed out the door on the way to Saint Vincent Medical Center in Erie.

“We called my parents to come stay with our three sleeping children,” Brewer said. “As we left the driveway the midwife called us back and said she would meet us at Saint Vincent.  We came down the hill toward the entrance of the college on the Bayfront Connector and Kathy began to cry out, ‘The baby’s coming! The baby’s coming!’”

Brewer said that he called the midwife, but his call went to voicemail. He later found out this was because she was brushing her teeth at that very moment. Then, the timeline shortened dramatically. Under the traffic light directly across from Penn State Behrend, his wife’s water broke.

After some quick deliberation, Brewer parked the car in the center median. The roads were clear; the day’s sun had melted them clean before the night’s chill took hold. With the night sky above him and temperatures in the 20s, he got out and ran to the passenger side door. Asher was born then, into his hands.

“I laid the baby on Kathy and we wrapped him in a towel and I ran back around to get into the car and we continued on to the hospital until I called 911,” he said. “They advised me to pull over and wait for an ambulance.”

Parked in the ICE arena on McClelland, waiting for dispatched emergency personnel, Brewer performed “rescue breathing and compressions” on the newborn baby, under EMT instruction until they arrived. One EMT, who heard the call on a scanner and lives in Wesleyville according to Brewer’s account, arrived at their car a couple minutes before the ambulances. He said was a nursing student at Behrend.

While Brewer didn’t get the student’s name, he says it’s another interesting tie to Behrend that made the couple think of naming him after the school.

The Brewers were escorted to St. Vincent where they named their child Asher, the meaning of which can be found in the book of Genesis: happy, or blessing. The Behrend student came to the hospital shortly after to see how everyone was doing. Asher was in the NICU for four days, with no serious complications, but “mainly because he was born outside of the hospital.”

The Brewer’s blessing is doing wonderfully, according to his parents. Asher “sleeps, eats, sleeps, eats and goes through a ton of diapers,” according to his mother.

His siblings, Peyton, 6, Veronica, 4, and Quinn, 2, “love and help take care of him.”

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THE GANNON KNIGHT