After being dropped off at a Kentucky fire station in a shoe box, a toddler has been adopted by the family that watched over him for the last 500 days. In May of 2022, the boy was handed over to first responders at a West Louisville fire station, and the mother never returned. Now, the child has found a new family to call his own for the rest of his life.
Lt. Col. Bobby Cooper, one of the firemen involved in the rescue of the boy named Samuel, spoke about his role and the feelings that his team had after the safe adoption of the boy. He told WDRB, “We were with Samuel from the very beginning. It was early morning, close to shift change, when his mother rang the doorbell here.”
At most stations, there is a “baby box.” It is a climate-controlled box that allows mothers to drop off a child without contacting a fireman and having that sometimes painful interaction. In this case, according to Lt. Col. Cooper, the station had no “baby box” and was therefore surrendered directly to the fireman working the station. This is perfectly legal as long as the child is handed to a fireman.
Cooper is now pushing for more of the city’s fire stations to get these baby boxes, saying, “Samuel in the arms of our firefighters, seeing the need, like the reality of it, has encouraged us — I guess is the best way to say it — to put in more Baby Boxes and has prompted the community to work with us to install more Baby Boxes.”
Chris and Brittanyy Tyler are the new parents to Samuel, whom they chose to foster as an infant. Speaking about this decision, Brittanyy said, “We had been trying to have a baby for a while and it wasn’t working out and we looked into adoption through an agency and it was very pricy so we looked into fostering because we wanted to be able to help and have babies in our home.”
The name, which was chosen by the Tylers, appears to have Biblical etymology because that is the reason it was chosen. The Tylers named the boy Samuel after the book of 1 Samuel, in which God miraculously gifted Hannah with a baby boy.
Brittany said, “I hung up and I said, ‘his name is Samuel. It can’t be anything else,’ because I prayed for him. In the book of 1 Samuel, Hannah prays to God that she would be able to have a son and He granted what she had asked to have and so she named him Samuel. So, that’s why we named him Samuel.”
The Tylers have brought their thankful attitude and gratefulness to God into every aspect of this story. Even going as far as to thank Samuel’s biological mother for her courage to surrender the baby to a fire station after giving birth. They said, “We love her and cherish her and thank God for her for what she did for Sam.” Samuel is one of 37 infant surrenders that have happened since 2017.
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