Police Chief Mike Horihan of West Branch, Iowa, canceled his time off and got dressed for a cold, grim day of searching the interstate. Long underwear. Boots. A heavy jacket. The night before, the temperature had dropped to 11 below zero, a record-setting low in eastern Iowa.
Out there, somewhere in that cold, was a 6-day-old baby.
“There was no mention of a quitting time or a giving-up time. I had the impression that everyone was going to be looking until we had exhausted all possibilities,” Horihan said. He is the chief of West Branch’s three-man Police Department.
This was Friday morning, Feb. 7. Early the day before, a newborn baby had been kidnapped in Beloit, Wis., and his aunt was a suspect. Police had found the aunt, pulled over at a gas station in West Branch. But she didn’t have the baby, and she denied knowing where he was.
So more than 24 hours later, police officers and FBI agents were still retracing her route, looking for something terrible: a bundle in a Dumpster or snowy footprints leading into the long grass along the highway.
“Realistically, we thought the baby could have been anywhere between Wisconsin and here,” Horihan said in a telephone interview. That was more than 170 miles, of which he was to search a stretch on the north side of Interstate 80.
Before this job, Horihan spent 30-plus years in the Iowa State Patrol, searching highways for runaways or suspects or crime victims. He was rarely the guy who found them. And he knew that they were never in the first place anyone looked.
This one was in the first place he looked.
It was a BP gas station, the first thing off the highway in West Branch. Behind the station, there was a stack of recycling bins - and a gray brown plastic tote bin.
“The lid was on it. There was frost on the lid,” Horihan said. He opened the lid and saw a black blanket inside. This was not a load of recycling.
“It was sending up red flags. So I went back into the station. I didn’t open it up any further. And I said to the owner, I says, ‘Is this your container?’ He says, ‘No, I’ve never seen this before in my life.’”
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, no,’” Horihan said.
It looked like he had found the baby, but far too late. The container was sealed. It had been out there all night.
Horihan went back to the bin and carefully opened the lid. “I was opening that container like I was trying to preserve evidence,” he said.
Once the lid was off, he saw that the black blanket inside rested on top of a deep pile of other blankets. Then Horihan heard something.
“It was just a - just a - more than a whimper. I don’t know how to duplicate it without sounding like an idiot. But it was loud enough [so that] you heard it,” Horihan said. He looked around to see if an animal had made a noise nearby. “Am I wanting to find the baby so bad that I’m hearing things?”
Then he heard it again. Horihan looked under the blanket, then turned to yell to his partner, who had the radio.
“I got a baby crying here! Baby crying here!” Horihan yelled. “I found the baby!”
“Infant inside a tote,” the other officer told the dispatcher. “It’s still cryin’ and alive.”
Under the blanket, it turned out, was a thick cocoon of swaddling blankets. And inside the swaddle was the baby, Kayden Powell. He was wearing a white sleeper suit and a little stocking hat. “The container was pretty much filled with either baby or blankets,” Horihan said. He thinks that when he opened the tote, cold air rushed in and startled the child.
The paramedics carried Kayden into their warm truck and unwrapped him. He was alert, with no signs of frostbite, they told the chief. He didn’t even cry very much.
“I’ve got to tell you, it was totally disbelief. It was total surprise, I just could not believe this was happening,” Horihan said. “Even when the baby was crying, I was thinking, how could this be?”
In the days since then, the baby’s aunt - Kristen R. Smith, 31 - has been charged with kidnapping, and she remains jailed in lieu of $50,000 bail. Charging documents say Smith had falsely claimed to be pregnant and then told others that she had given birth Feb. 5, the day before the kidnapping. Police said they found a prosthetic pregnancy belly in her car.
In West Branch, Horihan said he’s been thinking about it ever since.
“I keep on wondering. And I keep on thinking. And I wonder, how could the baby survive? It must have taken a right combination of the right type of clothes on the baby” and the right placement of the bin, he said. Although the bin was outside, it was behind a building, out of the wind.
“And there must have been just enough air” inside, Horihan said.
In the excitement after the baby was found, Horihan had a reminder of the conditions that the infant had lived through.
He ran back to his car to get a camera so he could photograph the baby in the bin, before paramedics arrived and disturbed the evidence. But he couldn’t.
“It was so cold, the battery in my camera wouldn’t work,” Horihan said.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/16/2014