Body of baby girl found in Boynton Inlet
BOYNTON BEACH — Chris Lemieux and two of his friends were on his boat catching bait Friday afternoon when they spotted what appeared to be a doll.
“Oh, look at the toy doll, ” Lemieux recalled someone saying.
The Boynton Beach firefighter/ paramedic looked, but he didn’t see a doll.
“I circled back around to con- firm what I think I saw,” Lemieux told The Palm Beach Post. “I was pretty much 100 percent sure.” He called 911.
The off-duty firefighter told
dispatchers he saw a baby floating in the water, and said it was too late for the baby to be saved.
As a firefighter in Boynton for 11 years, Lemieux has seen horrible things. He’s learned to deal with tough situations, he said. But never was he faced with something like this.
“It’s very unfortunate to think that somebody would actually do something like that to a baby,” he said. “We couldn’t have done a nything to help the baby. It was beyond help.”
The Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office is investigating what happened to the infant, a girl. Her age wasn’t immediately known and neither was the amount of time she was in the water, said Teri Barbera, sheriff ’s office spokeswoman. The baby was taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office to determine her cause of death and her name, if possible, Barbera said.
Lemieux,34,andh is friends found the baby around 1:2 0 p.m. on the ocean side of the Boynton Beach Inlet. News spread among the Boynton fire - fighter community. Mike Landress, the department’s assistant chief of EMS, was listening to the radio and heard the call. He went fishing with Lemieux this past Tuesday.
“When we think we’ve seen it all, we get this ,” Landress told The Post. “It’s awful.”
On the 27-foot conch boat with Lemieux was Lemieux’s friend’s 18-year-old son, who starts EMT school Monday. Lemieux chose to turn tragedy into a teaching moment.
“I had a talk with him. (I said) ‘You’re probably going to see stuff like this in the future,’” Lemieux said. “It’s part of the career as a firefighter/paramedic that we run into stuff like that. He understood what I was saying. I made sure he was OK. PTSD-type stuff is big in the fire service.”
Lemieux said he was also OK. He kept busy getting ready for a fishing tournament today. “It kept our mind off of it,” he said. But not entirely.
“It just blows my mind that you see stuff like that,” he said, “And you think how the heck could somebody do something like that? I don’t know the situation, but you go through it in your mind: how’d it happen and this and that.”