"Like somebody dug a hole in my heart."
That's how Faye Cherry, 18, said she felt 24 hours after learning her baby girl had been kidnapped from her nursery bed at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
A task force of FBI agents and Philadelphia police detectives has been formed in an effort to locate 4-month-old LaShae Cherry, who was abducted from the hospital Saturday, authorities said.
Cherry was preparing to leave for the hospital about 3:30 p.m. Saturday when she received a call from the hospital that a woman posing as an aunt had taken LaShae from her fifth-floor room about noon.
The tired, saddened 18-year-old said from the couch in her mother's house on Arch Street near 58th: "I want her to bring my baby back. Just please."
FBI Special Agent Dick Ross said both sides of the infant's family have been questioned and are not suspects in the abduction.
According to Capt. Richard DeLise, Police Department spokesman, a woman obtained a Children's Hospital visitor's badge at 11:30 a.m. Saturday after telling a security guard she was the child's aunt.
LaShae - Cherry's second child - had been sickly since birth and was hospitalized Monday for pneumonia. She was scheduled to be released Saturday, her mother said.
The mystery woman asked if the baby was going to be released and was told that she was, said hospital spokeswoman Shirley Bonnem.
A man who was in the fifth-floor nursery at the time told police the woman spent nearly half an hour playing with the baby. Then, he said, she said to the gurgling child, "Let's go for a walk."
When the woman hadn't returned the baby to the nursery by noon, she was paged by a nurse. She didn't answer the page, and the nurse, growing anxious, searched the other nurseries, Bonnem said.
The nurse then alerted hospital security, which conducted a two-hour sweep of the hospital but found nothing, Bonnem said. Then police were called.
"The original thought was, the woman was the aunt and was taking the child home without realizing there was paperwork to fill out before the baby could be discharged," Bonnem said.
"This is a wretched first for the hospital," she said. "The hospital's paramount interest right now is finding the baby."
Police and FBI agents concentrated their search for the woman in the University City area after a witness reported seeing a woman matching the description of the abductor get off the Route 42 bus at 40th and Spruce streets Saturday afternoon, DeLise said at a hospital press conference yesterday.
