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.
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“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.
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"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.
“I was like, ‘Don’t get too excited yet,’” he says. “My biggest fear was that the note I wrote wouldn’t stay with Zoey and she’d be gone. It was a very stressful few days.”
Zoey was placed in the station’s Safe Haven Baby Box on Jan. 2. On Jan. 4, she was home with the firefighter and his wife. The couple adopted Zoey in April.
“The way I found her... This was God helping us out,” he says, adding that it's difficult not to cry when he tells the story.
The firefighter says he’s sharing the story in hopes that it gives Zoey’s biological mother “some closure.”
“We want her to know that her child is taken care of and that she’s loved beyond words,” he says. One detail he learned later from the hospital is that the baby's umbilical cord had been tied off with a shoelace.
There are 148 Safe Haven Baby Boxes in the United States, and 31 babies have been safely surrendered, according to the organization's website. The devices are temperature controlled and feature a bassinet-style bed inside, easy for retrieval.
Safe Haven Baby Boxes Founder Monica Kelsey spoke at a press conference in January, the same day that Zoey was surrendered.
“We want to address the parents who legally surrendered this infant. And right now I’m going to talk directly to her or him,” she said, at the time. “Thank you. Thank you for keeping your child safe. Thank you for bringing your child to a place that you knew was going to take care of this child. And thank you for doing what you felt was best.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY
