(CNN) An Indiana teenager is being honored after a distressed parent left a newborn child in a baby drop-off box he raised money to install.
Hunter Wart, 19, spent more than a year mowing lawns and scrapping metal to raise the $10,000 needed to purchase a Safe Haven Baby Box for the Seymour Fire Department.
Wart was a junior at Columbus North High School when he decided to raise the funds as part of his senior project.
"It was a lot of hard work," his mom Julia Kwasniewski told CNN. "A lot of blood, sweat and tears." Wart spent a lot of time collecting metal, which Kwasniewski helped him shuttle to a scrap yard.
The student's hard work paid off in June 2019, when the box was finally installed at the fire department. Such boxes are meant to prevent abandonment of newborns.
thecatmom on January 26th, 2020 at 04:58 UTC »
I know the need of these boxes is definitely a downer, but I think the fact this kid worked so hard for this to happen in his town is uplifting. In the article it says he chose the name, Mia, that the baby is being being called now. That really made me smile. How rewarding that must feel to know he made such a difference.
GenieInAButthole on January 26th, 2020 at 04:22 UTC »
Those boxes do save lives. A girl in my hometown gave birth in her bathtub after a hidden pregnancy and ended up putting it in a styrofoam cooler and letting it die because she was too scared of her religious parents finding out and had nowhere to take the baby. She was eventually acquitted because of this. It was decided that she acted under “extreme duress” with “no viable alternative” because they were able to show that her father might have killed her if he’d found out and there were no social programs in place at the time for her to turn to.
noob_almost on January 26th, 2020 at 04:09 UTC »
This article causes too many emotions