Five years after I adopted a baby who had been abandoned at the fire station, a woman knocked on my door and demanded that I return the child.
It was a stormy night at Fire Station #14—the kind where the wind howled against the windows and the silence between emergency calls felt heavy. I was in the middle of my shift, sipping coffee and chatting with my partner Joe, when we heard something strange: a faint, desperate cry just outside the bay doors.
We stepped out into the cold night and followed the sound until Joe spotted it—a small basket nestled against the station wall. Inside was a newborn, barely a few days old, wrapped in a thin blanket, his cheeks flushed from the cold. When I lifted him, his tiny hand wrapped around my finger, and in that moment, something inside me shifted. We immediately contacted Child Protective Services, and they took the baby into care. They named him “Baby Boy Doe.” But I couldn’t get his face—or that brief connection we shared—out of my mind. I called every week, hoping for updates.
Then one day, Joe voiced the question that had been on my mind for weeks: “Have you thought about adopting him?”
The path to adoption wasn’t simple. As a single firefighter with unpredictable hours, the process was filled with hurdles—mountains of paperwork, interviews, and home inspections. But I couldn’t just walk away. That baby had been left at our station for a reason. When no one came forward to claim him, I knew I had to step up.
