Abandoned Newborn Baby Dumped in a Pile of Rubbish Found Alive by the Road, After Man Walking by Hears Her Cries

Editor's note: This article was originally published on July 29, 2022. It has since been updated.

American ex-pat Eric Ransdell was walking home when he heard the cries of an infant coming from a pile of rubbish near his flat in Chiang Mai, Thailand. On searching, he found an hours-old baby girl whose umbilical cord was still attached, covered in a black and red cotton blanket next to an old tire. When he found the baby her arm was sticking out of the blanket which made him think she was dead. Eric said he checked her pulse and then alerted friends, who called the police and rescue workers. The baby was rushed to the hospital where she was admitted to intensive care and is now recovering while the police try to identify her mother. Ransdell shared the baby's image on Instagram. When Eric visited the baby in the hospital he said, she is a "very lucky baby. "The baby is in the infants' ICU and doing well."

He continued, "They have her on antibiotics as a preventive measure for the next five to seven days, but other than that they say she is healthy. They still don’t know her exact age, though the head ICU nurse told me she’s fairly certain she was either a newborn or less than 48 hours old. I then met with a woman from social services who told me that once she is discharged from ICU, she will go to an infant care facility next to the hospital for three to four weeks," he recalled. "After that, there is a home for infants run by the government where she will stay while the police try to locate the mother."

However, the locals have said that finding the people who dumped the baby in the residential area could be a difficult task. A street food seller who works nearby said, "This is a residential area where there are lots of different groups of people."

"It has been more quiet recently due to the pandemic so I think there might not have been anybody around to witness the cruel person who did this," he added.

Police said the search will be difficult because most of the nearby buildings are private property. Lieutenant Thanchanok Phromraj said, "Almost every CCTV camera in the area belongs to condominium blocks, which will take longer for us to access to them all." He continued, "We suspect that the mother's incentive to leave her baby might be that she is in poverty and struggling to pay her bills due to the pandemic or it was an unexpected baby and she did not want anybody to know."

As cruel as this may sound, this is not a new thing. Stories of people abandoning their babies in dumpsters or other unsuspecting or even dangerous places keep emerging every now and then. In an unfortunate incident, twin nine-month-old boys were found abandoned near railway tracks in Worcester, US, last year. Employees of the railroad company had found the babies, who were alone in the area of the railroad tracks near Kansas Street, reported CBS Boston.

One resident, Carl Wooden, said he knows who the mother of those children are and he was with her a short time before she left them. "I’m angry, I’m sad. Confused,” he said. He added that he had been with the family watching fireworks the previous night. "I'm in shock still. I'm, like, walking around in circles just totally in awe," Wooden said to WCVB5. "I just left the police station for questioning and stuff like that," he added. "It's traumatizing, to me, that something like this could even happen." Coming back to the Thai baby, we hope she makes a speedy recovery and finds a loving home for life. We also congratulate Eric Ransdell for being the kind of human we are in dire need of right now.

References:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CAHvrCAlkQM/?hl=en

https://boston.cbslocal.com/2019/07/03/worcester-twin-baby-boys-railroad-tracks-police/

https://www.wcvb.com/article/twins-found-abandoned-near-railroad-tracks-in-worcester-police-say/28280807#

Representative Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Photo by Andesign101