Ben Carson delivered son in bathroom, used hair clip to cut umbilical cord: wife
The legend of Dr. Ben Carson continues to grow.
In a newly published book, “A Doctor in the House: My Life With Ben Carson,” his wife, Lacene “Candy” Carson, writes that when she was pregnant with their second son, the now-retired neurosurgeon delivered him in the bathroom of their home after she went into premature labor — using a hair clip to cut the umbilical cord.
“Ben dashed into the bathroom just in time to catch BJ before he fully emerged, holding the baby in one hand while he caught the afterbirth in the other,” she writes.
MacGyver-like childbirthing aside, the book fills out other parts of Carson’s colorful biography:
• As a student at Yale, where the two met, Carson was “obsessed” with foosball, developing a signature “lightning-fast shot” that fellow players named after him.
• Carson was once carjacked by two men at a gas station. Ben chased down the car and confronted the thieves, who recognized him as the famed doctor from Johns Hopkins. According to the book, they stopped the car, shook his hand and gave him the car back, saying it was an honor to meet him.
• The book also delves into the candidate’s troubled childhood, including an ill-fated suicide attempt with rat poison when he was in the third grade. “I’m looking for the best way to kill myself,” Ben told his older brother, according to Candy. “Something bad happened at school, and there’s no other way out of this.” His brother, though, talked him out of it.
Dr. Ben Carson laughs as his wife, Candy Carson, waves to a crowd of supporters in Phoenix on Aug. 18, 2015. (Photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP)
In November, the soft-spoken Carson said that, as a teenager, Carson “would go after people with rocks and bricks, and baseball bats and hammers,” and once “tried to stab someone” — a story he detailed in several of his own books.
“One afternoon when I was fourteen, I argued with a friend named Bob,” Carson writes in 1996’s “Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence.” “Pulling out a camping knife, I lunged at my friend. The steel blade struck his metal belt buckle and snapped.”
But other facts the 64-year-old Carson has shared about his formative years have been challenged during the campaign.
In “Gifted Hands,” Carson’s better-known book that was also published in 1996, he claimed he was offered a full scholarship to West Point. But according to Politico, West Point had no record of Carson seeking admission to the academy, which doesn’t award scholarships to anyone. (Cadets agree to serve in the military for at least five years after graduation, and are given a free education in exchange.) Carson’s campaign subsequently clarified that he was not formally offered a scholarship, but met with ROTC supervisors who tried to recruit him.
In the same book, Carson claimed that as a junior at Yale, he took a psychology course called “Perceptions 301.” According to Carson, the female professor informed the class that their final exams had “inadvertently burned,” requiring a new one to be administered. Carson recalled that the new exam was much tougher, and that all 150 students in class walked out — except him.
“The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture,” Carson wrote. “‘A hoax,’ the teacher said. ‘We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class.’”
But on Nov. 6, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Yale Daily News never ran a photo of Carson, and that there was never a “psychology course by that name or class number during any of Mr. Carson’s years at Yale.”
And in an interview with SiriusXM Radio the same month, Carson said he had been held at gunpoint at a Popeyes restaurant in Baltimore in the early 1980s.
“A guy comes in and puts a gun in my ribs,” Carson said. “And I just said, ‘I believe that you want the guy behind the counter.’ He said, ‘Oh, okay.’”
The Baltimore Police Department later said it couldn’t find a police report matching Carson’s story.
