Man Who Saved Newborn Gets Reunion at Graduation

One of the better graduation-day stories of the season: A man who played a hunch and rescued an abandoned baby in frigid temperatures got to see her again for the first time at her high school graduation, reports WFIE. The couple who adopted Skyler James managed to track down Charlie Heflin before the ceremony in Charleston, Illinois, and invited him as a surprise guest. "Speechless," Skyler tells ABC News of the reunion. "I just hugged him and cried."

The 1995 rescue is a story in itself. Heflin, a volunteer firefighter, was in his truck when he heard a report come across the scanner about a woman who said she left her baby by a pine tree in a particular cemetery. He listened for 10 minutes, but when rescuers couldn't find the baby, Heflin drove to a different cemetery on his own. He checked a pine tree with footprints in the snow around it, but found nothing and returned to his truck. Then he went back. “As I approached the tree, I heard a baby whimper," he recalls. He found the newborn and kept her warm until paramedics arrived—then said hello again 18 years later. (Click to read about a more recent baby rescue.)