Kidnapped baby

[Tendervittles]

This one, I can't remember the name, but his brother was looking for him.

He'd stumbled across a box in his attic with the newspaper articles, and up until then he'd never even been told he had an older brother.

His mother told him she'd taken the baby in the stroller to the grocery store, and while there, these two girls started making a real fuss over him. Then later, she noticed them following her home.

When she got home, she realized she couldn't carry both the baby and the groceries upstairs to her apartment, so she asked the neighbor shaking out her rugs to watch him.

Well, the neighbor dropped the ball, when the mom came out to get her baby, he wasn't there, she runs up and down the street calling for him, but nothing.

The police act like they don't know if they can do anything either.

When the brother checks the police report, he finds out that some lady in a train station tells a porter or a security officer that these two young girls asked her to hold the baby while they went to the restroom, only they never came back and her train was about to leave.

The officer didn't want the baby, so the lady said, ok well I'll take him I guess, I've raised lots of babies, so one more won't be any trouble.

The brother went to the address he found for her, but she'd long since moved away.

Really sad thing, the police had the information a few days after the baby went missing, and yet did nothing to follow up on any of it.

I don't recall them ever updating this case either.

[Cori aka ChrisSCrush]

I was just about to ask about this. It happened to a black family in a northern urban area, possibly Chicago, in the 1940s. The lady who took the baby on the train was going to an area down south.

[crystaldawn]

His name was Lawrence Harding Jr. I don't know of any update to the case.

[Tendervittles]

The thing that always struck me about that was how complacent the mother and the police seemed to be.

And the lady who took him home with her -- if she were indeed a mother herself, how could she get through the years with a clear conscience knowing somewhere a mom might be missing her child???

At the very least, even back then, people just KNEW it wasn't right to keep something that wasn't yours.
And especially a child!!

this world is a weird place sometimes

[Cori aka ChrisSCrush]

The lady on the train seemed to mean well. She assumed the infant was one that one of the girls gave birth to and couldn't afford to keep.

[mozartpc27]

I just watched this case again. What struck me this time was this: the whole story about the initial kidnapping seems fishy to me. I hate to speak ill of the dead, and obviously I don't have access to the original police reports, but the whole account seems exceedingly strange. Two girls follow this lady home from the drug store, and then, outside her house, grab the baby and run. This all depends on a decision by Mrs. Harding which the girls could not possibly have anticipated - that she would leave her baby outside her house, essentially unattended, while she went inside to put groceries away. The girls couldn't possibly have known she was going to do this - so why follow/stalk her as Mrs. Harding said they did?

It wouldn't surprise me if the baby died somehow - either through abuse, accident, or some other means - and for one reason or another its mother felt guilty about it, or perhaps feared an undeserved and violent reaction against her from her husband, and concocted the whole episode. There would appear to have been an "independent" witness - the neighbor - but she may have had reason to help the baby's mother in corroborating her story.

Of one thing I am certain: the incident reported later, about the old woman who ends up getting stuck with a baby by a young woman on a train platform, has nothing whatsoever to do with the kidnapping - UNLESS it was Mrs. Harding who in fact gave the baby away. Why go through all the trouble of kidnapping a baby just to hand it off to a randomly selected stranger on a train platform?