Elysia Laub, a 9-year-old from Indiana, was playing in the backyard when she heard some noises. At first, she assumed it was one of her family’s pigs that had escaped.
Then she looked closer and screamed.
Naturally, her mother came running to see what was going on.
“It just freaked me out, I didn’t know what it was,” she told CBS 2’s Brad Edwards in 2016.
Her mother, Heidi Laub, explained that it was a newborn baby with the placenta and umbilical chord still attached.
“That’s when she was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a baby,’ and I was like, ‘What?!” Elysia recalled.
“I just saw pink legs kicking away,” Elysia said. “I knew it was alive and I knew we had something. I could not second guess myself. I knew we had to get help.”
Authorities at the Lake County Sheriff’s office believed the baby was less than a day old. Sheriff John Buncich later called Elysia the child’s “guardian angel.”
The baby suffered from sun exposure, but was expected to be fine not long after being taken to St. Anthony’s Hospital for treatment.
“I didn’t do this myself,” Elysia said. “Somebody helped me — God. He put me in that place.”
“If I wasn’t there and God didn’t tell my brain – if my brain didn’t make me go over there, we would find a dead baby in the yard this afternoon,” Elysia said. “It would be much worse and much different.”
The officers are taking care of the newborn as one of their own and, for now, the baby has Elysia to thank for getting a second chance at life.
