Newborn baby left in Safe Haven Baby Box was adopted by the firefighter who found her
Ocala FL June 22 2023 A firefighter in Ocala, Florida, was pulling an overnight shift at the station in January when he was awoken at 2 a.m. by an alarm.
He recognized the sound immediately. A newborn had been placed in the building’s Safe Haven Baby Box, a device that allows someone to safely and anonymously surrender a child — no questions asked.
“To be honest, I thought it was a false alarm,” the firefighter, who wishes to remain anonymous to protect his family’s privacy, tells TODAY.com. But when he opened the box, he discovered a healthy infant wrapped in a pink blanket.
That baby would become his daughter Zoey.
“She had a little bottle with her and she was just chilling,” he recalls. “I picked her up and held her. We locked eyes, and that was it. I’ve loved her ever since that moment.”
The firefighter and his wife had been struggling for more than a decade to have a baby, and the wheels in his head started turning.
“I didn’t call my wife right away because I didn’t want to wake her up, but I knew she’d be on board,” he says of his plan. He would go to the hospital with baby, and inquire about adopting her.
At the hospital, the firefighter, who is also a paramedic, wrote a note and left it with Zoey.
“I explained that my wife and I had been trying for 10 years to have a baby. I told them we’d completed all of our classes in the state of Florida and were registered to adopt,” he says. “All we needed was a child.”
When the firefighter finally spoke to his wife, she started crying.
