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A woman from Cape Town was left fuming after she saw a crying baby left alone in a warm bakkie while the mother was nowhere to be seen.
““I was so angry,” says Ashley Morris about the incident. “I couldn’t believe it.”
She was so upset by the sound of the baby girl crying that she forced the electric window of the Isuzu Range Rover that the baby was trapped down and pulled the baby out of her car seat.
Ashley arrived with a friend at the Akeso Psychiatric Hospital in Kenilworth on Monday evening at 6pm.
“For some reason I just had this feeling we should go earlier. We sat and watched the squirrels. And then I hear a baby crying. My motherly instincts kicked in. And I started feeling panicked.”
Ashley said the moment she picked up the baby and held her she stopped crying and smiled at her. Security at the hospital arrived at the scene and tried to figure out what had happened.
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Ashley posted about the incident on Facebook and said the mother didn’t even seem very concerned about the fact that a stranger was holding her baby.
The mother of the baby girl said that she was checking on her baby every five minutes.
“She hadn’t slept all day and I knew that she’d wake up in 45 minutes. The hospital also looked into the situation and people saw that I’d been to the car every five minutes.”
She said that she hadn’t tried to grab her baby out of Ashley’s arms because she could see that Ashley was angry and didn’t want to get into a fight with her.
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“I’d never leave my baby alone in a public place, Akeso has security gates and I could see the car from the room I was sitting in at the clinic.”
The mom says she has no guilty feelings about the incident.
Ashley has vowed to take the matter further but as yet she hasn’t laid any formal charges. The temperature reached in Cape Town on Monday was 27 degree Celsius.
Ashley's Facebook post has been shared more than 2 000 times.
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In 2012, YOU journalist Petro-Anne Vlok decided to willingly put herself in harm's way by spending some time in a parked car with no ventilation - while it was 36°C outside.
WARNING: Do not attempt to try this. Petro-Anne's experiment was strictly monitored by medical personnel.
