When police officers from West Virginia State Police pulled over a suspected drunk driver in Princeton, they didn’t expect to find a baby in the backseat.
So when they saw the saw the baby, filthy and covered in vomit, the sight pulled at their heartstrings.
According to trooper D.C. Graham, the female driver appeared to be drunk. Her car was a mess, with trash everywhere and a foul oder emanating from it.
On closer inspection, that was when he saw the baby boy, clad only in a diaper. Sitting in an improper child safety seat, the child had a bad cough and drenched in vomit.
“I’ve been doing this for a while now and that was probably one of the worst things I’ve experienced, seeing a baby in that condition,” Graham told CNN.
Graham took the 1-year-old back to the state police barracks because it was only less than half a mile away.
“We brought him in to the barracks and the smell of vomit and feces overtook the room,” he said.
“The baby was crying profusely. We tried everything. He was just so upset in the condition he was in. There was nothing we could do to get him to stop crying. I said, ‘I can’t let him sit in this.'”
As a father himself, officer Graham could not bear to leave the child looking as he did, so he went ahead and cleaned the boy himself at the sink.
The boy appeared to be visibly pleased with the bath.
“As soon as I got him in there and started washing him off, a smile came on his face,” Graham said.
He then wrapped the boy in a towel and personally kept an eye on him until the officers from the child protective services arrived and took the boy into their custody.
The barracks wasn’t entirely child friendly, so Graham just held him and gave him a teddy bear to play with.
“He was kind of just my little sidekick for a couple of hours,” he said.
As for the boy’s mother, she is now facing DUI charges. In fact, the officers didn’t even get to know the child’s name because she had been to intoxicated to answer.
Now the boy is now with a legal guardian.
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