‘IT WOULD BE AN HONOR TO MEET HER’
16 years ago this baby inspired Safe Haven Law
Nearly 17 years ago, Pam Morris saved the life of a newborn girl, known as “Baby May,” when she found her stuffed in a plastic bag, wrapped in a blood-soaked towel, alongside the back tire of her parked car in Worcester.
Morris, 55, has an adorable photo of the beautiful, blueeyed baby, a smile on her cherubic face, that she received in the mail at Christmas, seven months after she discovered the infant.
The framed photo hangs on her living room wall.
Morris now wants to meet the girl who was the inspiration for the state’s Baby Safe Haven Law, a landmark rule that allows a parent to leave their newborn with a staffer at a hospital, police station or fire station, with no questions asked and no prosecution.
“I wonder if she’s still alive,” Morris told me this week. “I bet she has long, brown auburnish hair. And she’s probably got her license by now.”
Today, Morris plans to make a public appeal to reunite with Baby May, now 16, at the spot where she discovered her.
“I want to know what she thinks about me finding her,” Morris said at a coffee shop near her Rhode Island home. “I want to meet her and find out everything. It’s like a void in my life I need to fill. I really hope she wants to meet me.”
It was cool outside on the morning of May 1, 2000, as Morris walked from her home to her car, which was parked at St. Vincent’s Hospital in downtown Worcester. She always loaded her belongings into the passenger side of her indigo Toyota RAV4 before driving to her job at the hospital business office downtown.
That morning, she spotted a brown plastic Stop & Shop bag by her rear right tire. She thought it was trash or a bag she had dropped while unloading groceries the night before. She gently nudged the bag with her foot.
“It was heavy,” she recalled. “It was like Jello.”
Then, she heard crying and saw little hands flailing. She backed up, thinking it was an animal, and then mustered the courage to peek inside. She gasped.
“All I saw was the baby’s face. A bloody white towel. I didn’t see the body. I only saw the arms,” Morris recalled.
She called the hospital on her cellphone.
“Oh my God,” she told the operator. “There’s a baby in a bag by my tire.”
She flagged down a man driving by. He took his jacket off and put it under the baby to keep her warm. A doctor from a nearby clinic came over and checked on the baby. An ambulance and police quickly arrived.
The cops questioned Morris. They asked her if she had children, if she wanted children.
At the time, Morris and her husband, now her ex, were undergoing fertility treatments. They wanted a girl.
The baby was healthy, weighing 7 pounds, 11 ounces. She was adopted by a loving set of adoptive parents, the Herald reported at the time.
A security camera captured a person abandoning the baby but Worcester police said no one was ever criminally charged.
Morris couldn’t sleep the night she found Baby May. She needed to know she was OK and was briefly allowed to see the baby at UMass Memorial Medical Center a few days later. She was cleaned up and had reddish, auburn hair.
“I wish I could have held what I found,” said Morris, who never had children.
The following Christmas, the parents sent Morris a photo of Baby May. That was the last Morris ever heard of the child. Recently, she came across Michael Morrissey, founder of Baby Safe Haven New England, on Facebook, and decided to publicly reach out to Baby May.
Since the law was enacted in 2004, more than 25 newborns have been safely surrendered to a safe haven. “All the work we’ve been doing is directly linked to what happened to her in the first few hours of her life,” Morrissey said. “It would be an incredible honor to meet her.” Morris thinks so, too. “I hope she has a nice life,” Morris said. “I’m sure she has good parents.”