A firefighter in Ocala, Florida, was working an overnight shift at the station back in January when an alarm woke him up at 2 a.m.
He recognized the sound immediately. It was a device that sets an alarm to alert someone that a newborn baby had just been placed in the building's Safe Haven Baby Box. The Baby Box allows anyone to safely and anonymously surrender a child without any questions asked.
“To be honest, I thought it was a false alarm,” the firefighter, who wishes to remain anonymous to protect his family's privacy, tells TODAY.com. But when he opened the box, he discovered a healthy infant wrapped in a pink blanket.
That baby would eventually become his daughter Zoey.
“She had a little bottle with her and she was just chilling,” he recalls. “I picked her up and held her. We locked eyes, and that was it. I’ve loved her ever since that moment.”
The firefighter and his wife had been trying for more than a decade to have a baby, and fate brought Zoey to them.
"I didn't call my wife right away because I didn't want to wake her up, but I knew she'd be on board," he says of his plan. He would go to the hospital with baby, and inquire about adopting her.
The firefighter, who is also a paramedic, wrote a note and left it with Zoey at the hospital.
“I explained that my wife and I had been trying for 10 years to have a baby. I told them we’d completed all of our classes in the state of Florida and were registered to adopt,” he says. "All we needed was a child."
When the firefighter finally spoke to his wife, she began to cry tears of joy.
“I was like, ‘Don’t get too excited yet,’” he says. “My biggest fear was that the note I wrote wouldn’t stay with Zoey and she’d be gone. It was a very stressful few days.”
It all happened within a short timeframe. Zoey was placed in the station’s Safe Haven Baby Box on Jan. 2. On Jan. 4, she was home with the firefighter and his wife. In April, the couple adopted Zoey.
“The way I found her... This was God helping us out,” he says, adding that it's difficult not to cry when he tells the story.
The firefighter is sharing the story in hopes that Zoey’s biological mother gets “some closure” knowing her baby was adopted by a loving family.
“We want her to know that her child is taken care of and that she’s loved beyond words,” he says. One detail he learned later from the hospital is that the baby's umbilical cord had been tied off with a shoelace.
There are 148 Safe Haven Baby Boxes in the United States, and 31 babies have been safely surrendered, according to the organization's website. The devices are temperature controlled and feature a bassinet-style bed inside, easy for retrieval.
“We want to address the parents who legally surrendered this infant. And right now I’m going to talk directly to her or him,” she said, at the time. “Thank you. Thank you for keeping your child safe. Thank you for bringing your child to a place that you knew was going to take care of this child. And thank you for doing what you felt was best
Source: Today