Just 50 hours after her birth, Desere-e Vivian Jackson became a crime victim.
Seven pounds, 6 ounces and 19 1/4 inches long, Desere-e was resting comfortably with her mother in Room 16 of Ward 54 of Cook County Hospital about 12:30 p.m. Friday.
A stranger, somebody who nobody at the hospital seems to know, walked in the room.
Shanon Williams, a 20-year-old West Side resident, chatted with the stranger before asking her to watch the infant while she went to the bathroom. When Williams returned, the stranger and the baby were gone.
They were still missing late Friday.
“The mother said she was very friendly,” said Harrison Area Police Cmdr. John Kozaritz. “She seemed very normal.”
“There should have been better security,” said Otis Jackson, the baby’s grandfather.
Williams could not be reached for comment. Earlier, she taped a televised plea that the stranger return her little girl.
According to Williams’ mother, Mary Williams, she trusted the stranger because she was in pain and wasn’t getting any help from her nurses. Mary Williams said her daughter told her that she was out of the room for about 10 minutes.
Police said they didn’t know if anyone saw the woman leave with the baby.
But Mary Williams said a hospital worker told her that a woman matching the suspect’s description was seen leaving the hospital in a gray car driven by a man. The child had been bundled in a hospital blanket and wore a cap on her head, Mary Williams said.
“It was like this was what they came to do,” Williams said. “To get somebody’s baby.”
FBI spokesman Bob Long said the suspect had been seen several times in the hospital over the last few months, but no one knew who she was.
Police describe the suspect as a black woman about 45 years old, 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing 165 pounds. Her curly black hair has blond-tipped ends, and she has a 2-inch vertical scar on her face, thought to be under her right eye, Long said.
Hospital officals refused to comment on security procedures, except to say they have their own security force that follows “routine police procedures.”
Friday’s incident was unsettling to parents.
“That scares me,” said Mike Duffy, who was expecting the birth of his child Friday at County Hospital. “You need to get a system going. You’ve got people going in and out.”