Police looking for parents of newborn baby girl found alive outside Florida trailer park
MULBERRY, FLORIDA: Authorities are looking for the parents of a newborn baby girl who was left to die in a wooded area in Mulberry, Florida. The infant was reportedly found around 2 am on Saturday, January 28, when temperatures fell to the 50s, according to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.
Magdalena Gregorio Ordonez heard noises outside her mobile home in Regal Loop Mobile Home Park, a community in Mulberry, Florida, about 10 miles south of Lakeland. She initially thought the noises were from "cats screaming and fighting" late Friday night, January 27. When the "screaming and crying" started again after some time, she and her husband went outside in the woods and found a newborn wrapped in a blanket, still attached to the placenta. Paramedics were called to the scene and they took the 6.5 lbs baby to a hospital, where she was reported to be healthy and stable.
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"It's an event that we don't see very often because there are safe haven laws," Judd said in a press conference on Sunday, January 29. Safe haven laws in Florida allow individuals to surrender unharmed newborns up to a week old. Judd said he christened the baby Angel Grace Lnu. "She's as beautiful as an angel. It's by the grace of God she is not dead, and Lnu is: Last Name Unknown," he explained. The sheriff said the infant was wrapped in an old blanket and was about an hour-and-a-half old when she was found.
"A lady thought she heard some cats screaming and fighting at about midnight going into Saturday morning, and then it quieted down," Judd said. "Then, at about an hour and a half later, she heard this screaming and crying again, and she went outside and said, 'Well, that's a baby.'" While the baby was "very healthy," it had "some insect bites for being in the woods at least an hour and a half wrapped in some old blankets and left there with still the umbilical cord and placenta attached," he continued. "We believe she is of Hispanic descent, and we need to know who the parents are. We have worked throughout the community, and no one claims to know who the mother is. From experience, usually, it's a younger person who does not want the child or has somehow hidden the presence of the child from their parents, and now they've abandoned this child in the woods all alone," Judd added.
Magdalena's daughter Eulalia, 12, told ABC Action News that she was "really surprised that they left a poor little girl on the [ground]." Judd hailed the Gregorios as "true heroes" for the life-saving discovery. The baby was eventually turned over to the Department of Children and Families and her biological mother now faces child neglect charges. "She is not required to take the child if she doesn't want the child," Judd said. "We will hold her accountable because she left this child abandoned in the woods, ostensibly, to die." The sheriff noted that the newborn child would have likely not made it if no one had found her. "Certainly, we saved this person from a homicide charge," he said of the mother. "Had that child laid out there and died, then we would be talking about a murder investigation. Now, we are not."
The agency will continue its efforts to locate the child's mother in the community. "We have gone door to door, and so far no one has cooperated," Judd said, adding that they have taken the baby's DNA to run it through records at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab. "There's still a lot of work to do, and over the weekend we just gathered evidence," he said. "All the pieces came together for that child to end up alive, healthy, and well, and I look forward to that time that child is in college, and who knows... maybe that's the little girl who finds the cure to all these horrible diseases in some lab in the future," the sheriff added.