AFTER Sarah O’Sullivan’s public attempt to locate her birth parents this week, two people involved in finding her have spoken of the support shown to her by the Swan Hill community at the start of her life.
Ms O’Sullivan, who was discovered on the floor of a Riverside Park female toilet cubicle on April 9, 1998, appeared on Channel Nine’s A Current Affair on Monday night in the hope of tracking down the people who conceived her.
The now 17-year-old spent the first month of her life named “Sophie” in the Swan Hill District Health nursery before eventually being adopted by Anne and Liam O’Sullivan from Melbourne’s south east.
Police never identified her birth mother or father following an investigation led by Swan Hill Detective Sergeant Dave McTaggart.
Now serving as Detective Senior Sergeant at Geelong Police, Mr McTaggart said he would never forget the case.
“It’s one of those things that, like all unsolved mysteries, you tend to reflect on occasionally and it would be great if ‘Baby Sophie’, who is now a mature woman, is able to reconnect with her parents,” Det Snr Sgt McTaggart said.
Det Snr Sgt McTaggart, who said his team made all the appropriate enquiries into the females in the area who were known to be pregnant at the time, believed it was difficult to make a definitive statement about the likelihood of who the mother was or where she came from.
However, he pointed out the Swan Hill community showed ‘Sophie’ lots of love and care while she stayed in town.
“The support from the Swan Hill community was sensational… how she was embraced by the community was pretty special, there was never going to be any shortage of people who were willing to be her family,” he said.
Marika King, The Guardian’s court and police reporter back in the late 1990s, was one of the first people to hold Sarah in her arms when she was found.
Initially from Lake Boga, nowadays Ms King is a mother herself and presents her own breakfast radio program in Queensland — she said it ‘spun her out’ when she saw Sarah’s story on television.
“It just brought back that entire afternoon,” Ms King said.
“I was very close with a lot of the coppers and I went down there and they literally had just brought her out of the toilets.
“She was still covered in afterbirth… she was probably three or four weeks premature.
“This was during a weekday as well — thank God there were tourists around on a Thursday afternoon and they heard her crying.”
“It was like in slow motion… everyone was like, my God, what happened here and what could we do, what needs to be done to help this child.”
Ms King, who stayed at the scene for the time before the baby was transferred to the hospital, wanted to let Sarah know just how much care the nurses, paramedics, police and community members wanted to provide her at the time.
“She was taken in by a community of people who literally just wanted to make her feel safe and cared for.”
