(WHOtv) ANKENY, Ia — Three mothers are mourning a baby’s death after he was found alone in a Des Moines apartment.
Police arrested a teen Tuesday night hours after finding his 4-month-old son unresponsive.
The police report states that the baby’s mother left 17-year-old Drew Weehler-Smith with the child so that she could run errands.
But when she came back to the apartment on Chaffee Road he was gone and their son, Gabriel McFarland was unresponsive lying in a chair.
Paramedics rushed him to the hospital where he later died.
Weehler-Smith was arrested at his mother’s house and is currently charged with neglect of a dependent person.
Additional charges are possible pending the results of an autopsy.
The death is just as heartbreaking for an Ankeny couple. For two-and-a-half months, Gabriel McFarland was their son.
The sixteen-year-old mother had made an agreement last September to give up her baby to Rachel and Heidi McFarland of Ankeny. The McFarland’s were there with her every step of the way, and they took Gabriel home to his new room where he lived until March 13th.
“It just felt natural. When he was with us it just felt right. Like we were always meant to be moms,” Rachel said.
They had supported the mother financially through her pregnancy and had been with her at every doctor’s appointment. They repeatedly asked her “Are you sure you want to do this?” The couple say she said “yes.”
On March 13th, they got a call from their lawyer that Gabriel’s birth mother wanted him back and there was little they could do about it. They were left with nothing.
“The thing is we have been scrutinized. Our lifestyle has been scrutinized; the people that are in our lives have been scrutinized. We had to have letters of reference for this home study to make sure that we were adequate as parents, and they never had to have anything when they took him back,” Rachel says.
In Iowa, the birth mother has three months and then one additional 31-day probationary period to change her mind about giving up her baby.
Gabriel was born deaf in one ear and the McFarlands had not only fitted him for a hearing aid, they had begun to prepare to learn sign language in case he lost the hearing in his other ear.