personalized baby blanket: Abandoned as a baby, now she's a graduate

Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, June 10, 2006

The baby girl abandoned in a paper bag by the side of a Redwood City road graduated from high school on Friday and got a very special present from the California Highway Patrol officer who found her.

Ashley Wyrick, 18, joined her classmates as they walked across the 50-yard line to accept their diplomas during commencement exercises on the football field at Sequoia High School.

There were tears in a lot of eyes, including those of her stepfather, John Herrmann.

"She was meant to be here," he said. "She has a purpose. You would never guess in 100 years from looking at her or talking with her that they found her where she was."

CHP Officer Steve Gibbons had pulled off Interstate 280 to stretch his legs on a winter night in 1987 when he heard the cry coming from the bag. He took young Ashley to Sequoia Hospital, where the nurses called her Miraculous Mary.

After her adoptive father died, she was legally adopted by her older adoptive sister and grew up and graduated in a white gown in the same town where she had once been left in a brown sack.

A few hours after the ceremony at the school, Officer Gibbons dropped by a graduation party at the family home to give Ashley a small parcel. Inside was the Highway Patrol jacket that he had used to wrap Ashley on the night he found her.

"He'd been saving it, wanting to give it to her for a long time," said Ashley's mother, Serene Herrmann. "It was like her personalized baby blanket. We all started crying."

Then Ashley, her family and friends -- including Sheryl Greenspan, the emergency room nurse who tended her on the night she was found -- embraced one another.

Ashley was among 285 members of the Sequoia High School graduating class. In the fall, she will attend the University of Arizona on a scholarship.

"I'm here to do something with my life," she said. "I'm not here to sit around and cry and waste my time thinking about what happened to me."

E-mail Steve Rubenstein at srubenstein@sfchronicle.com.