Baby on board
When a tot was abandoned at a subway station, it led to an unusual journey in finding new parents…
When social worker Danny Stewart went out for dinner back in August 2000, it probably didn’t seem like it was going to be a remarkable day. It was around 8.30pm and he was on his way to meet his partner of three years, Pete Mercurio, when something caught his eye.
An odd bundle nestled up against a wall in the 14th Street subway station in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood. He never could have expected what was inside…
‘I glanced down and saw what I thought was just a doll,’ Danny told a news programme at the time. ‘But as I started to go up the stairs, he started to move, so I knew he was alive.’
The ‘doll’ was in fact a newborn baby boy with some of his umbilical cord still attached. Shocked and concerned, Danny ran to a payphone and called the police – as well as Pete, who both arrived on the scene at the same time.
The baby was taken to hospital and the couple vowed to keep track of him and send him a card every year.
The boy was to be placed in foster care and Danny was contacted by the Administration for Children’s Services, who asked him to attend a family court hearing for the baby in December 2000.
The court wanted the little lad to be placed in preadoptive foster care, but the judge asked if Danny would be interested in adopting the abandoned baby. Whilst the couple hadn’t been thinking about adoption at the time, Danny saw it as a gift.
‘I did feel connected, I felt this was not even an opportunity, it was a gift…’ he said.
Only, when he told Pete, he initially said no, and the couple argued about it. Danny said he would adopt with or without Pete’s blessing. But when the two of them attended a foster care visit, and Pete held the baby, everything changed.
‘The baby squeezed my finger with his entire hand so hard,’ Pete said. ‘He was just staring up at me and I was just looking at him, and it was almost like he found a pressure point in my finger that just opened up my heart to my head and showed me in that moment that I could be one of his parents, one of his dads.’
They decided to name him Kevin and, after checks were carried out, they had their little boy home in time for Christmas and the adoption was finalised two years later.
In 2011, when same-sex marriages became legal in New York, Danny and Pete decided to marry and Kevin knew just
‘It wasn’t an opportunity, it was a gift’
the person to officiate. He suggested they contact the judge who had made them a family during the initial adoption hearing – and she agreed!
The family have been in and out of the limelight and Pete, now 52, has even written a children’s book, Our Subway Baby, about their journey.
Now aged 20, Kevin is at college studying maths and computer science, runs marathons and will no doubt go on to have a fulfilling and successful life. He’s respectful, empathetic, kind and his dads love him to bits. The heart-warming, happy ending that Kevin undoubtedly deserved.