Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 7, 1990 TAG: 9004070332
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium
The mother held tightly to her baby during the Thursday afternoon incident and demanded to see the woman's identification. Nurses and hospital security were alerted after the woman left the room, but she was not apprehended.
"I don't know what made me distrust her," said the 28-year-old mother, who did not want her name revealed. "It was just intuition, I guess. When she first came in, she seemed a little nervous. I was holding onto the baby all the time, pretty tightly.
"It only hit me afterward what nearly happened. Now I'm scared."
At 3 a.m. Friday, a woman matching the suspect's description was spotted in the lobby of nearby Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters, police said. Once again, she left before she could be detained.
Area hospitals have been alerted of the abduction attempt. The woman was described as white, in her early 40s with wiry blond hair, 5 feet 4 inches tall and 150 pounds. She wore a dirty white sweater, blue smock, white pants and white and pink Reebok tennis shoes.
Both police and health officials said Friday that the abduction of infants is a national problem that, until Thursday, apparently had bypassed South Hampton Roads.
The mother gave birth Wednesday afternoon, and was in a private room on the hospital's fourth floor, she said. Between 5 and 5:30 p.m. Thursday, she and the baby were in the room when the woman posing as a volunteer walked in.
"She approached me and said she needed to take the baby - the nursery needed the baby for blood tests," the mother recalled. "I said it wasn't time for the baby to go, so she left. Then, a couple of minutes later, she came back.
When the mother asked to see some identification, the woman said, "Oh, I'm a volunteer, I don't know about these things," the mother said. The woman said she would go to the nursery to check procedures, and left.
The mother immediately called the nurses' station, and nurses called security. But, by then, the woman had slipped away.
Deborah Myers, a hospital spokeswoman, said that although this was the first attempted abduction she knew of at Norfolk General, there has been a rash of kidnappings in hospitals across the nation during the past few years.
by CNB