By Dave Andrusko
What are the odds that driving school instructor John Belyea would find two abandoned babies tucked away behind a wall outside a back entrance to Lamphere High School in Madison Heights, Michigan?
It was Saturday and “before swapping students for a segment one session, instructor John Belyea and a student were planning to go inside for a bathroom break,” Megan Woods reported for Local 4.
It was early afternoon, around 1 p.m. when he heard the cries.
“When I came over here (toward the entrance), I’m listening, and it’s a weird noise like two cats fighting,” said Belyea, the father of three children. “Something’s wrong. So I started making loud noise to scare them off, and I’m like, wait a minute, that’s not cats. I’m thinking, ‘That sounds like a baby.’ I didn’t see anything, so I walked over where I heard the noise from around the wall where the two infants were at,” he told Local 4.
Belyea said the smallest child was in a car seat with a cover and blanket, and the other child looked to be around 1 year old. Police later confirmed the child is 2 years old.
Had he not heard them, there would likely have been no one around until Monday.
In an update, Madison Heights police reported that on Thursday, July 20 “that a woman was taken into custody after two young children were abandoned behind Lamphere High School.”
The 20 year old was arraigned and was charged with two counts of child abandonment and two counts of child abuse.
Both Belyea and Woods emphasized that Michigan has “safe haven laws where children born within 72 hours can be dropped off at designated locations like hospitals, police and fire departments.”
On the Local 4 website you read
“For families going through tough situations, United Way has a Michigan resource database for anything from diapers to food and rental assistance.”