A Firefighter who found a newborn baby girl in Safe Haven Baby Box in Florida is now adopting her.
The rescuer who found baby Zoey at a fire station adopted her with his wife after trying to become parents for nearly ten years.
“We’ve been trying for almost a decade to have a family, and everything has kind of not worked out for us. So we are like, “Don’t get our hopes up, don’t get our hopes up,”‘ said his wife, and Zoey’s adoptive mom.
The Firefighter who wished to stay anonymous found Zoey in a baby compartment at Ocala Fire Station no. 1 in January when he was working his night shift.
Around 2 am, the rescuer heard an alarm indicating a baby had been surrendered at the fire station’s baby box, where people leave their infants when they can’t keep or take care of them.
“To be honest, I thought it was a false alarm,” he told TODAY.
However, when he opened the baby box, he was surprised to see a newborn girl wrapped in a pink blanket inside the compartment.
“She had a little bottle with her and she was just chilling,” he recalled to TODAY. “I picked her up and held her. We locked eyes, and that was it. I’ve loved her ever since that moment.”
The firefighter took baby Zoey to the hospital and decided to ask if he could adopt her since he and his wife had been trying to conceive for the past decade. But when they failed, the couple decided to go for adoption.
“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 said. “I told them we’d completed all of our classes in the state of Florida and were registered to adopt. All we needed was a child.”
When he got home, he immediately told his wife about the baby girl and asked if she would like to adopt Zoey; his wife started crying.
“I was like, ‘Don’t get too excited yet,’” he added. “My biggest fear was that the note I wrote wouldn’t stay with [the baby] and she’d be gone. It was a very stressful few days.”
They took her home two days after the rescuer found the girl in the Safe Haven Baby Box. However, the adoption process was officially completed in April 2023.
“The way I found her … this was God helping us out,” he told TODAY.
Today, the couple is very happy to call themselves baby Zoey’s parents.
“It wasn’t real until I got the call I could go in there with her in the NICU,” the adoptive mother told WKMG. “We’ve been trying for almost a decade to have a family, and everything has kind of not worked out for us. So we are like, ‘Don’t get our hopes up, don’t get our hopes up.’”
“Everyone was just in disbelief, honestly, that she was hand-delivered to us almost and that everything had kind of worked itself out to where we could bring her home two days later,” she added.
Share Your Thoughts:
Let us know your thoughts in the comments
