"Give Me the Baby!"

A commuter takes an unexpected detour to stop a distraught parent

- Derek Burnett

Another sticky late-July Thursday in Philadelphia, and 52-year-old Christine Dawn King was hurrying to her job as a caregiver to the elderly. Or trying to. The traffic on Interstate 95 was thick—no surprise for this stretch of highway. She pulled into the exit lane, which was moving at a crawl.

That’s when she spotted a man and woman standing beside a stopped vehicle and engaged in some kind of altercation. King watched as the woman repeatedly attempted to block the man as he headed toward the guardrail, which overlooked a 40-foot drop onto a concrete parking lot. The man kept pushing the woman aside and shifting some object from his right arm to his left. Having reached the guardrail, he dangled the object out over the precipice. Oh my God, King realized. That’s a baby! The woman, in tears and physically outmatched, struggled to pull the man back from the edge.

King hit the brakes, flung open her door and ran at the man along the shoulder of the debris-strewn highway. “Give me the baby!” she cried. “Don’t do this!”