Free Republic

Susan Anderson remembers feeling some labor pain, but she couldn’t have imagined how surprisingly fast her daughter was born. She and her husband made the short trip from their Coral Springs home to a birthing center. She was footsteps from the center’s front door Thursday, but didn’t make it: She gave birth to her second daughter right there in the parking lot. Her baby girl, Julia Anderson, was born healthily — now with a very interesting story to tell when she gets older. “My first daughter was a normal length, I would say, about two hours of pushing. I thought...

The call Jeannene Anderson always dreaded came on a day in March. A New Orleans homicide detective across the line barely finished the words "death investigation," when Anderson fell to the floor thinking of her daughter's peregrine life. Julia, who for years had lived as a transient, would not be coming home. New Orleans police found her in a McDonald's parking lot the evening of March 19, clutching her neck from a stab wound authorities say was inflicted by another transient, 38-year-old Christopher Hutsell. She was rushed to surgery but died several hours later. "People in this situation, where you've...