Naquelle Ballard had everything she needed to bring a new baby home: Infant car seat, bottles and diapers. Everything, except the baby.
So she concocted a plan. And Wednesday morning, the 19-year-old put her plan into place, according to Clayton County police. Dressed in blue scrubs she bought at Walmart, Ballard drove to Southern Regional Medical Center.
Inside the hospital, police said, Ballard walked around for an hour before she walked into a room, got a newborn and tried to leave the hospital. Ballard was later arrested at her home and booked into Clayton County jail, where the judge on Thursday ordered her held without bond.
Karletta Woods, a grandmother of the 2-day-old girl, was en route to her daughter's room as she unknowingly walked by Ballard, who was trying to get out of the hospital with the baby.
“I passed her in the hallway, not having any clue my grandbaby was in her purse,” Woods told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday.
Woods’ daughter, Jas'mere Brown, was being discharged, and Woods was at the hospital to bring mother and baby to their College Park home. A hospital crib was in the hallway, outside her daughter's room.
"Where's your baby?" Woods said when she walked in the room.
A woman who said she was a nurse's tech had just been in the room to check the baby's vital signs, Brown told her mother. The lady then offered to take the baby to the nursery, and even drop off some of Brown's paperwork at the nurse's station, Woods said.
The nurse tech was actually Ballard, according to police and hospital officials. After pushing the baby's crib outside of the room, Ballard allegedly grabbed the newborn and tossed Brown's papers aside. According to her arrest warrants, Ballard put the baby inside her purse and tried to walk out of the hospital.
Before Woods could get to the nurse's station, she heard an alarm ringing. A monitor on her granddaughter's bracelet triggered the alarm when the baby was carried outside of double doors and into a stairwell.
But Ballard didn't get very far. Two maintenance workers who watched Ballard walk on the hospital floor ran after her as the alarm sounded.
One man shouted for the her to stop, but she instead ran, according to police. The man was able to get her purse from her, but Ballard kept running, all the way to her black Expedition, according to police.
"She's gone, but I got her license plate number," one of the workers told Woods.
The actions of the two men prevented the newborn from being taken from the hospital.
"We are just really, really grateful," Woods said.
Inside the purse were Ballard's credit cards and personal information -- and 2-day-old Khloe Alaniya McBride. The infant was not harmed.
Clayton County officers followed the black SUV for about 5 miles to Ballard's Lake Harbin Road home in Morrow. There, Ballard was taken into custody and interviewed, police said. Wednesday afternoon, she was charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment, both felonies.
While being interviewed, Ballard told police she knew her actions were wrong, but she had been planning to kidnap a baby for several months, the warrant affidavit filed in Clayton County Magistrate Court states. Ballard said she miscarried in September, the affidavit states.
But she never told her boyfriend she was no longer pregnant, the court documents state.
Instead, she told him she had delivered their child earlier this week, Ballard told police. She had to kidnap a baby, the woman said, because she wanted to take the child to her boyfriend's house and pretend it was their baby, the affidavit states.
Ballard stared without visible reaction as the judge read her charges and set her next hearing for Jan. 17. No family members or friends were in the courtroom.
Although he doesn't know all of the details of Ballard's case, Athens psychologist Kip Matthews told the AJC rates of both depression and anxiety go up significantly after a miscarriage for up to 12 months.
"For teens, they don’t often have adequate coping resources to effectively deal with a situation like this," said Matthews, vice president of AK Counseling & Consulting, Inc.
The shock of losing a baby could prompt anger and guilt, Matthews said.
Woods said her family had been dealing with a loss of its own in recent weeks. Woods' other daughter delivered a premature baby in November. That baby died on Christmas Day. Seven days later, Brown was at the hospital, several days before her due date.
Her family simply could not bear any more heartbreak or the loss of another baby, Woods said. There is no excuse for someone attempting something as drastic as stealing a baby, no matter the circumstances, she said.
"There's no man worth taking someone else's child," Woods said.
Khloe's mother told Channel 2 Action News she doesn't plan on letting her baby out of her sight again. She said she's still in shock that someone would attempt to steal a newborn.
“After all the hard work I’ve done, and I just went through all of this pain to get her here, you don’t do that to someone," Brown said.
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