FINDING BABY IN BUS STOP ‘STILL RAW IN MY MIND’
I T WAS just meant to be a normal car ride home for Talitha Beales.
But July 11, 2017, was a day that would change her life. She was just driving with her dad, Daniel Braxton, when she spotted something that looked strange and out of place at a bus stop. Incredibly, it turned out to be a newborn baby.
She screamed, and her dad thought she was playing a prank when she said she’d seen a baby in the bus stop.
“I remember every second,” she says now, two years on and now aged 19.
“It’s still raw in my mind. As dad drove past the bus stop, I saw the baby covered in blood, it still had the umbilical cord attached, and I thought it was dead.
“My dad didn’t believe me at first. He thought it was a prank. But we rang the ambulance, and we heard her cries. She was taking her last breaths. I didn’t know what to think.
“It’s crazy. You don’t expect to find a baby in a bus stop.”
Talitha “screamed hysterically” at the sight of the blood-covered infant on the concrete floor, and it fell to her and her dad to try to save the baby’s life as they waited for the emergency services to arrive. When they did, police sealed off the area.
Forensics officers dusted the bus shelter down, while a makeshift interview room was set up in a caravan close to the scene, with a police helicopter scrambled to the area.
An investigation to find the mother began, but was called off a few months later after what was described as a “painstaking and meticulous investigation”.
Today, little is known about the baby and what happened to her. But it’s thought she was placed into foster care.
What frustrates Talitha the most is not being told what happened to the baby, whose life she may well have saved.
“The worst thing that annoys me is I haven’t heard anything since it happened,” she says.
“I practically saved her life. It’s horrible.”
Talitha, who was on her way home to Stoke-on-Trent after spending time with her dad in Wales, hopes to become a veterinary assistant and says the experience has made her “grateful”.
“It’s stuck with me a lot,” she said of the discovery in Towyn, Conwy.
“It made me grateful that we were there at the time.
“She would have passed away, but we were there at the right time at the right place.”