www.goodnewsnetwork.org
They Found A Baby on the Subway—Now He's Their Adopted Son
They found a baby on an NYC subway platform. Now he's Danny Stewart and Peter Mercurio's son.
Social & Lifestyle
When it comes to “where babies come from” some tales of impending parenthood can be pretty farfetched: babies delivered via stork, tots turning up under cabbage leaves, infants arriving on the subway.
But as hard as it might be to believe, that last one’s true—at least in part.
In August of 2000, Danny Stewart was rushing to make dinner date with his partner, Pete Mercurio, and was running late when he spied a suspicious bundle on a New York City subway platform. Thinking at first that it was just a doll, Stewart hurried on—until something caught his eye.
The doll wasn’t a doll at all. It was a baby boy—a newborn, with the remnants of an umbilical cord still attached.
While cell phone technology wasn’t new a couple of decades ago, it still wasn’t ubiquitous back then. So Stewart was forced to seek out a payphone on the street to alert the police of his find.
After going back to check on the baby, he made a second trip to the phone to alert his partner. Mercurio was out the door in a flash, arriving just moments after the cops had taken the baby into their custody.
“I remember turning to Danny and saying to him on the sidewalk as the police car was driving away, ‘You know, you’re going to be connected to that baby in some way for the rest of your life,’” Mercurio recalled to the BBC.