LOWELL — Lake County Sheriff John Buncich praised an unidentified 9-year-old girl as a “guardian angel” for finding an abandoned newborn early Monday near a wooded rural area 3 miles west of this town.
“The officers have really taken a personal approach to this. We have nicknamed this baby our miracle baby.
“If you think about it, if that 9-year-old had not gone out in that yard to play, what a tragic result could have occurred ... to abandon a baby like this almost 100 yard from the road,” an emotional Buncich said at a Monday afternoon press conference.
He said a medical team at Franciscan St. Anthony Health in Crown Point has judged the infant Jane Doe, a full-term Caucasian girl with brownish-blond hair, to be healthy and in good condition, other than being sunburned.
Buncich said the state’s Child Protective Services has found a foster home to take the child early Tuesday once St. Anthony completes it medical examination.
The infant was discovered in the 18000 block of White Oak Avenue, just west of the intersection of U.S. 41 and Ind. 2, a sparsely occupied area of open farm fields and large wooded sections in unincorporated West Creek Township.
He said the 9-year-old’s mother carried the baby inside her home and called Lake County E-911 at 10:47 a.m. Monday. “The homeowner who said her 9-year-old daughter was playing in the back yard and found an infant wrapped in a blanket and a (black) towel.
Buncich said it remains undetermined how long the infant had been abandoned, but the placenta and umbilical cord were still attached, indicating it had been born less than a day, possibly only a few hours before the discovery.
Police said they searched the area with police dogs and the county police helicopter without results.
“We’d like to locate the mother. We’d like to talk to her. We are asking anybody to come forth with any knowledge about anybody who may have done this,” he said. They are asked to called the Sheriff’s Department Report-A-Crime hotline at 1 (800) 750-2746. Police said all calls will remain strictly anonymous.
“There are laws in the state of Indiana that allow someone to give up a baby at a public place, like a fire station, a police station without any consequence,” the sheriff said.
Source http://www.nwitimes.com/
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