'I'm Baby Jessica'

LOUISE DICKSON, CanWest News Service
Published: Sunday, May 14, 2006
Twenty years ago, Glen O'Keefe and Ray Wightman found a newborn baby, near death, crying in a sports bag abandoned in a cold creek on Victoria's Triangle Mountain.

Last week, Baby Jessica found them.

And her words - "Thank you for finding me" - were ones they never expected to hear.

"It's unbelievable," a stunned O'Keefe said.

"I told her - 'Hey, you've just repaid us by getting in touch.' It's something we've always dreamed of, but never expected to happen."

"It's pretty overwhelming," Wightman said. "I'm just sort of walking around in circles. It's really exciting. I never thought this day would come."

On April 14, 1986, the two 15-year-old boys and their friend Chris Johnson were walking up a road when they heard crying coming from a pink-striped Adidas bag in an overgrown, watery ditch.

Inside was a soaking-wet newborn.

Police thought Baby Jessica, as she became known, had been born an hour before she was left in the stream. Her mother was never found.

But the baby found a permanent home in the hearts of those boys.

Every year, O'Keefe and Wightman got together to celebrate the birthday of the baby they saved - but whose fate became a mystery after she was adopted.

This year, on her 20th birthday, they talked to the Victoria Times Colonist about how much they would love to meet her, how they hoped she had a good life and had been adopted by a great family.

Meanwhile, in northern British Columbia, completely unaware of the newspaper article, 20-year-old Adriana Jessica Kelly contacted the provincial adoption registry.

On Thursday, her case worker gave her copies of the Times Colonist articles written about Baby Jessica. Kelly, in turn, called the Times Colonist.

"I'm Baby Jessica," she said.

"It's a lot to take in. It's actually quite exciting," Kelly said, on the phone from Smithers, B.C.

Kelly said she had gone to the adoption registry because she was curious about her birth parents.

"I asked my mum what she knew and she said it wasn't a very good thing, but she didn't know exactly what had happened.

"This is really interesting. It wasn't really the answer I was looking for, but hey, it's a good thing. It's meant a lot to those guys."

Kelly was adopted by Sherry and Lorne Kelly of Smithers. She has a younger brother and an older sister.

She was 12 before she was told she was adopted, a discovery she acknowledges was "a little weird."

"Adoption hasn't affected me. I just have a lot of curiosity about where I came from and why.

"I had a wonderful childhood. When I was little, I did gymnastics from the age of 5 and competed for about six years. I graduated two years ago from Smithers Secondary. I played on the basketball team there."

Kelly is engaged to be married, works at a grocery store and is training to become a paramedic, specializing in infant transportation.

All that is music to the ears of O'Keefe and Wightman, who spent the last 20 years hoping that the shivering, fragile infant they saved was happy and healthy.

"I told her it was some weird kind of fate that we just happened to walk by there that day at that time," Wightman said after Kelly phoned both her long-ago rescuers Thursday night.

"Honestly, if she'd stopped crying for five minutes ..."

As for Kelly, being able to thank the boys who saved her life was "awesome."

Victoria Times Colonist

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2006