Miracle Survival: Couple Hears Cries, Discovers Baby Abandoned at Bottom of 75-Foot Ravine
If you’ve studied history at all, you know that infanticide through exposure to the elements has appeared in many, many cultures over many, many years. The Greeks and the Romans commonly employed this horrible practice.
So did various pagan tribes in Europe and Scandinavia. We like to think that civilization and Christianity wiped out the practice.
Sadly, a news report out of Hendersonville, North Carolina, shows that it’s still very much with us. According to WHNS, the story began when Cheryl Fowler was bringing dinner to her husband on May 9.
“My husband was working late in his dump truck,” Cheryl explained. “I was coming to bring him his supper, and I heard a baby crying.”
There are a lot of things that can sound like a disgruntled infant. Cats and certain birds have been known to make sounds that mimic a baby’s wail.
But as she listened, perched some 700 feet from a precipitous drop into a ravine, Cheryl became increasingly convinced that she was hearing a real child. She actually asked her daughter to come and listen with her, just to make sure.
“I just knew somebody somewhere hurt a baby in the woods,” she said. When Cheryl’s husband, Scott Fowler, arrived in his dump truck, he did what any wise man should do: He listened to his wife.
“My wife said, ‘We hear a baby crying,’ so I cut my truck off,” Scott said. “We first didn’t know if it was a crow or what, but then my daughter saw it.”
What his daughter saw defies explanation. Near the bottom of a 75-foot drop was an infant’s child seat — and the infant herself.
Scott recalled what flashed through his mind, saying, “I thought, … ‘That is a baby!’ … She had fell out of her baby chair and bumped her head on a rock. …
“She was wet, hungry, and cold. And banged up a little bit.”
The driver scrambled down the steep embankment and scooped up the baby, which immediately stilled her wailing. “She quit crying immediately after he picked her up,” Cheryl said.
“I got my hand under her head and started to pick her up a little bit and I realized she was kind of quieting down,” Scott confirmed, according to WYFF. “And I picked her up on out of there and she quieted down and just looked at me and quit crying.”
The baby’s name was Shaylie Madden, and she was only seven weeks old. Her mother had gone to police, insisting that someone had kidnapped her and her baby and somehow only she had managed to escape.
Her story quickly disintegrated, though. Police have charged her with first-degree attempted murder, and she’s currently being held on $750,000 bail.
Cheryl was shocked that anyone could do such a thing to an infant. “I love my children more than life itself, so I can’t imagine any human being throwing a baby away like a piece of garbage,” she said.
She added that she believed finding little Shaylie was divine intervention. “Everything was the good Lord’s work,” she said.
“We heard her. We found the baby.
“My phone worked each time I made a call, and we never get reception out here.”
Scott agreed, stating, “The good Lord put it in our ears and put us in place to find her.”
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