In 2003, a Westminster, Colorado, mother brought her newborn baby girl to a fire station. She handed the baby to two firefighters and left, never to be seen again. Tom O’Neill answered the knock on the fire station door on February 15, 2003, and was handed the girl.
“Out on this side of the door, there was just a couple there, and they handed me a baby,” said Tom in 2015.
The abandonment was perfectly legal and perfectly sad. Under Colorado's safe-haven law, parents can bring babies up to three days old to a fire station or hospital — no questions asked.
“I look at the child,” paramedic Duane Linkus said of the moment. “Child looks fine, and Tom’s giving me the look in his eyes that something’s going on. And that’s when it hits me, that she’s here to drop this baby off.”
A couple, Julie and John Burke, had been having issues conceiving and adopting. That fateful night in 2003, they received a phone call from a family friend.
“'Oh my gosh, there’s a baby left at a fire station,'" Julie recalled. “She was so tiny and the biggest thing on her were these big, beautiful, brown eyes.”
The Burkes knew that the little girl would become their daughter, and she did. In the video below, she is 12 years old and has always known where she came from and who saved her.
“Because there’s a lot of women, people, who are afraid to have babies, and when they do, they make bad choices about it, but my tummy mommy made a really, really good choice,” Halle said.
Please SHARE Halle's story to show others how safe-haven laws can save lives.
