JONESBORO, Ark. – A mother is describing a terrifying incident taking place while her child was at an area hospital receiving care.
Lory Beth Snyder, of Walnut Ridge, described the ordeal in detail on her personal Facebook profile and the story has been shared thousands of times.
“The most terrifying thing happened to my family two days ago,” Snyder wrote.
While Snyder’s four-month old baby was in NEA Baptist Memorial Hospital, she reported a lady from across the hallway came into their room, while Snyder was sleeping, and took her baby.
“When I found her, she was in another woman’s hospital room, in that woman’s arms, with a room full of six or seven nurses just laughing and playing with her and Lorelai,” Snyder wrote. “I didn’t know this lady. She was not a nurse or a doctor. Just another hospital patient.”
Snyder said she took her infant out of the woman’s arms but the woman told her, persistently, that the mother “needed to just go rest.” The mother took her baby from the stranger’s arms while several hospital employees, nurses as the mother described them, gathered up belongings from a diaper bag which was also taken.
“We then returned to our room,” Snyder wrote. “Three nurses followed me. They all trying to assure me that my child was in no danger, that they knew the patient, and she meant no harm.”
However, Snyder described the strangely-behaving patient as following her back into her room. The woman began asking for the child, again.
“It was then that the nurses had to remove her from our room,” Snyder wrote.
Snyder and child were transferred to ICU to a secure unit with security, she wrote. No other incidents happened after that but the shock did not wear off. She wrote in the post how she did not know the woman’s intentions, making it a worry.
“I don’t know what she herself was ill with, something that could make my daughter sick,” Snyder wrote. “I don’t know anything! I don’t know what her actual intent with my child was. What she did with her. Or even how long she actually had her.”
Snyder contacted Jonesboro Police Department, who dispatched Officer Tyler Wilson to the hospital. He interviewed the stranger, whose name we are omitting because there have been no charges filed.
Wilson wrote she “advised that she was not harming the child, just taking care of it while the mother of the child slept.”
He advised the mother there were no criminal charges and everything else which occurred would be a civil issue between the mother and the hospital, but this did not sit well with the angry mother.
“Apparently anyone can take any child anywhere, and it’s not kidnapping as long as you don’t intend to harm the child,” Snyder wrote. “So says the law according to the Jonesboro PD. Whether or not the intent of harm was or was not there, a child should never be taken in the way in which my daughter was.”
JPD has assigned a detective to do a follow-up investigation into the incident.
NEA Report reached out to NEA Baptist and will post a statement from their organization when received.
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