By Dave Andrusko
Two weeks after a woman walked away having just given birth to a baby on a sidewalk in Omaha, Nebraska, another newborn baby was abandoned in Memphis, Tennessee. Baby Boy #1 was lucky. Witnesses were present when the mother gave birth and cared for him.
Baby Boy #2, tragically, was not so fortunate. Called by a woman who found him naked and not breathing, soon after they arrived “Southaven Police soon realized the baby was dead,” Anders Anglesey reported.
The woman, a critical care nurse, “told local news media the placenta was still connected and that she did not hear anyone knock on her door, or have any idea why the baby was left outside her home.”
Reporting for the Western Journal, Amanda Thomason wrote that “Trinity Shakespeare, 27, of Omaha, is charged with felony child abuse in the Feb. 13 incident, according to the Omaha Police Department.”
Sheila Allee described how horrified onlookers were. She
was one of the people who stepped in that morning near the intersection of 24th and P Street, though she says the whole thing was “traumatizing” and “wrong.”
“She came up over here, right?” Crane told KETV-TV. “She was cold. She, she was in pain. She was crying and I know her.”
The woman refused medical treatment, and the medics who arrived with the ambulance left, but thankfully enough people realized what was going on that they were able to gather blankets and wait for the baby.
Allee told the Omaha World-Herald that she went over and spotted the “beautiful baby boy.” But Latrell Crane knew something was seriously wrong and not only because it was 15-degree weather.
“I come over and then the baby is on the sidewalk,” Crane said. “Like, just in the fetal position, not breathing. Still her umbilical cord still attached, know what I’m saying? And then … it’s just my instinct because I have two kids in my own, right? I grabbed the umbilical cord and wrapped around my hand.
“And I shook his chest. ‘Come on, baby. Come on, come on, come on.’ And he said, ‘Wah, oh, wah.’
“I have two kids. My own two boys. That she just left him on the sidewalk … it’s not cool. It’s not cool at all, man. I was the one that saved him.”
“Many have wondered what could cause a mother to abandon her newborn infant in such a shocking way,” Thomason wrote,”According to the Omaha World-Herald, Shakespeare told a friend she’d been using marijuana and meth.”
When she was released from the hospital, Shakespeare was arrested on a charge of felony child abuse and taken to jail.