Less than three weeks after a plea for her mother to come forward went viral, Katheryn Deprill has finally met the woman who abandoned her 27 years ago in a Pennsylvania Burger King restaurant.
Known as the “Burger King Baby,” she got a lifetime of questions answered when she met her mother. It was the first time the two contacted since the mother, who remained in the Lehigh Valley, left Deprill at the Allentown restaurant on September 15, 1986.
“Oh, my God, I’m so excited!” said Deprill. “I have literally not wiped the smile off my face. I never in a million years thought I’d find her.”
“It’s definitely the best scenario possible,” Deprill said. “She’s very normal. She’s very sweet.”
Deprill confirmed on Tuesday that she had finally met her mum, but she said she didn’t want anymore media interviews. She stated that she’s been bombarded by media requests since she took to Facebook on March 2nd, looking for her birth mum.
Deprill’s mum, who wants to remain anonymous, went to Allentown attorney John Waldron for advice on how to handle the situation on March 13 — 11 days after Deprill started her search.
Waldron arranged a meeting at his office. Deprill showed up with the youngest of her three sons, 7-month-old Jackson, and her adoptive mother. Her birth mum showed up with her husband. “It was pure shock to see it was actually her standing there,” Deprill said. “The first thing I got was my hug that I wanted.”
“Everyone hugged,” Waldron added. “It brought tears to your eyes.”
For hours, Deprill asked questions she had wanted to for decades – Why did you leave me? What is my heritage? Do you have any health problems I should know about? “It was emotional and dramatic,” Waldron said.
Waldron said the mother explained she became pregnant when she was raped in a foreign country by a stranger during a family vacation when she was 16. Ashamed and embarrassed, she kept the pregnancy a secret. The mother, according to Waldron, said she gave birth in her bedroom at age 17 without her parents knowing and drove to Burger King to drop off the baby, knowing it would be crowded and someone would find the infant.
“She kissed the baby on the forehead and left,” Waldron said. “She was a kid in high school. Back then, you couldn’t just go to a hospital and drop the baby off, no questions asked. It wasn’t, ‘I don’t want the child.’ It was because of what happened. … Sometimes rape victims blame themselves even though they’re not at fault.”
Deprill’s birth mum also told Deprill that she’s of Irish and German heritage.
“I felt like I was looking at myself in the mirror,” Deprill said. “She definitely looked like what I had thought.”
Awww!
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