In a moment of complete desperation, a woman was ready to walk out of a hospital with another’s woman’s newborn baby.
The young woman, Talita Meireles, had a miscarriage on June 27 and was suffering from postnatal depression when the incident took place. Along with the grief of losing her baby, the woman also felt afraid to tell her husband and her family that she had a miscarriage.
Feeling like she could not face her family, the 23-year-old woman tried to steal somebody else’s child by dressing up as a nurse, according to The Sun.
Talita had arrived at the hospital in Curitiba, Brazil, about a fortnight after she lost her baby in the miscarriage. She entered the maternity ward and later claimed that she had done so because she wanted to take a look at the newborn babies in the hospital.
She arrived at the same time when the staff was changing shifts. As a result, she managed to get inside without anybody asking her to sign in.
Once she was inside, Talita found a nurse’s uniform in the changing room and put the outfit on herself. Then, she approached a mother in the ward and told her that her baby needed to have some tests done.
Talita took the baby away and eventually got out of the nurse’s uniform before trying to exit the hospital with the infant. CCTV footage recorded from the hospital shows the young woman walking around with the stolen baby in her arms.
Before Talita could escape, she was caught by a staff member who noticed that she was not wearing a patient wristband. The police were called to the hospital, and they began questioning the distressed young woman.
The infant child was soon reunited with their mother, and no harm was reported to have happened to the baby.
While speaking to the police, Talita became extremely emotional and claimed she did not want to tell anyone about her miscarriage, as reported by Mirror.
“I lost my child. I just didn’t want to tell my family. I didn’t want to tell anyone,” Talita said. “I really don’t know what happened to me. I was desperate.”
“I’m alone. I don’t have anyone with me,” she went on to say. “I don’t know what went through my head.”
When asked about her husband, Talita said that he was traveling at the time.
The woman also claimed that she went to the maternity ward only to look at the babies but wound up acting in the spur of the moment.
“I went to look at the children,” she recalled. “I started to look at them. I wanted to take one in my arms. And then everything happened. I didn’t want to do anything bad.”
Details were not revealed about whether the bereaved mother was taken into custody for the incident.
When the hospital spoke after the incident, they claimed to have successfully prevented Talita from carrying out the crime, and they stood by the efficiency of their safety protocols.
