A Florida firefighter and his wife adopted a newborn baby left in a Safe Haven Box in January this year.
In the US, Safe Haven Baby Boxes and A Safe Haven for Newborns are two charities that provide distressed mothers with a safe place to surrender their unwanted newborns instead of dumping them in trash cans or along roadsides.
It was in one of these boxes that Ocala firefighter Vincent found what would eventually become his new daughter Zoey.
Vincent was on shift at his fire station when he was awoken by an alarm at 2am alerting him someone had placed something in the Safe Haven Baby Box.
"To be honest, I thought it was a false alarm," he told NBC's Today show on yesterday's show.
When he opened the box, he saw an infant wrapped in a pink blanket nestled inside.
"She had a little bottle with her and she was just chilling," he said. "I picked her up and held her. We locked eyes, and that was it. I’ve loved her ever since that moment."
Vincent and wife Katy had been wanting to have kids for nearly a decade but had been struggling to conceive.
"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.
Vincent dropped the baby off at the hospital to be checked over and left a note with her for staff.
"I explained that my wife and I had been trying for 10 years to have a baby. I told them we’d completed all of our classes in the state of Florida and were registered to adopt," he says. "All we needed was a child."
When he told his wife of his plan she started crying and was excited for their possible new addition to the family.
"I was like, 'don’t get too excited yet,'" he said. "My biggest fear was that the note I wrote wouldn’t stay with Zoey and she’d be gone. It was a very stressful few days."
The couple were allowed to take baby Zoey, as she came to be known, home two days later and they officially adopted her in April.
The firefighter shared the story in hopes that it gave Zoey's birth mother "some closure".
"We want her to know that her child is taken care of and that she’s loved beyond words."
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