A Pittsburg husband and wife heading to work helped bring a baby girl into the world early Monday morning in the parking lot of the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station.

Tonya Mattox, a 42-year-old reservations manager at a Fisherman's Wharf hotel, said she and her husband park at the BART station each weekday morning to catch the 6:02 a.m. train into San Francisco.

As they were walking through the parking lot on Monday morning, they saw a van speed by, its tires squealing as it rounded a corner, Mattox said. A young man jumped out and yelled repeatedly, "She's having a baby!"

Mattox said she knew she had to help however she could, and approached the van, where a woman was giving birth in the front seat and appeared to be in a lot of pain.

"We knew we couldn't walk by them," she said.

Mattox said the baby was coming out and "we could see the umbilical cord."

A taxi driver who had been in the taxi bay of the lot was already helping the expectant parents, and Mattox's husband called 911 while Mattox turned her attention to the baby girl.

The newborn wasn't breathing, and Mattox, a mother of two, surmised that her mouth needed to be cleared, so she told the father he had to suck the little girl's mouth and he followed her orders.

"He had no fear, he did what he had to do," she said.

The taxi driver finally had gotten an emergency dispatcher on the phone, who instructed the impromptu delivery crew to find a shoestring to cut the umbilical cord, Mattox recalled.

Mattox's husband offered the string from his boots -- he works as a UPS deliveryman in San Francisco -- and, following instructions from the dispatcher, they tied the string and cut the cord, Mattox said.

At that point, the young father was thanking everyone, Mattox said.

She told the new dad that this was going to be his daughter's story for life.

Finally, a fire truck arrived and took the parents and new baby to a nearby hospital.

Mattox said the father had been driving to Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley when he realized they were not going to make it and he pulled over at the BART station.

The woman told Mattox this was her third baby.

Once the family had left, Mattox and her husband realized they had missed their train into work, but caught a later one.

"We kept looking at each other and said, 'Did that really happen?'"

They both went to work -- although Mattox said her husband first had to buy new shoestrings for his boots -- and were texting each other about their incredible morning.

"I've seen a lot of strange things, and that's not one of them," Mattox said.