14 DAY TRIAL // Less than three weeks after Katheryn Deprill, from South Whitehall Township, initiated a Facebook campaign in an attempt to find her biological mother, the abandoned woman says she found her and met her for the first time on Monday at an attorney's office.
Deprill, who was dubbed the “Burger King Baby,” was abandoned 27 years ago in an Allentown, Pennsylvania Burger King restaurant. After doctors asked her questions about her family’s medical history, she decided to search her real mother, posting a photo on Facebook of herself holding a sign asking for help.
Her efforts proved to be fructuous, as she found her mother in less than one month.
The woman says she felt “pure joy” when she met her birth mother and had a lifetime of questions about her identity answered. It was the first time the two saw each other since the mother left Deprill at the South Fourth Street restaurant on September 15, 1986.
“She is better than anything I could've ever imagined. She is so sweet and amazing. I'm so happy. I have literally not wiped the smile off my face. I never in a million years thought I’d find her,” Deprill said, as reported by NY Daily News.
The mother and daughter met for about four hours and exchanged contact information. Deprill was amazed by the strong resemblance she shared with her birth mother and mentioned they planned to continue seeing each other.
“We are definitely going to have a relationship,” she added.
It seems that the mother, whose name was not revealed to the press, was raped when she was 16 years old, during a trip abroad and became pregnant. She reportedly hid the pregnancy from her parents and delivered the child secretly. After giving birth alone in her bedroom, she felt she could not take the baby to the hospital, so she decided to leave it in a public place.
“She left me somewhere she knew I'd be found. She did not want to throw me away,” Deprill said.
After she found out the distressing details of her birth and abandonment, she said she understood her mother's decision and forgave her “110 percent, absolutely.”
Attorney John Waldron, who arranged the meeting between the two, said that the mother had decided to launch her own search about six months ago, as she also wanted to find her daughter she abandoned at the age of 17.