A decade ago, on Nov. 1, 2007, Joe Pilon was sitting in his office at Sudbury Regional Hospital's Memorial site, when he received some shocking news.
A newborn baby girl had been abducted from the hospital's St. Joseph's Health Centre shortly before 1 p.m. that day.
St. Joseph's — then a busy health-care facility, in contrast to the derelict site it is today — went into lock-down mode, and an Ontario-wide Amber Alert issued. All highways leading out of the city were roadblocked.
Pilon, then the hospital's senior vice-president, said his heart dropped.
“Just the possibility that a mother has just had a baby and that baby has gone missing, for me anyway, there's nothing worse that could happen in my life than if my child was abducted,” he said.
“I have a daughter. She's 28 now, but if she had ever been abducted, I don't know what I would have done with myself.”
It eventually emerged the baby was taken by Kirkland Lake woman Brenda Batisse, who had dressed up in hospital scrubs and went into the new mother's room, telling her the baby had to be weighed.
By the time roadblocks had been set up, Batisse was already long gone, but not for long. She was arrested at her home in Kirkland Lake at 8:30 p.m. the same day, and the baby — which she had dressed in boys' clothing — returned to her parents unharmed.
At her trial, the public learned more about Batisse and her tragic history. An Anishnaabe woman who had been abused during her childhood, she testified she had abducted the baby after her own pregnancy ended in miscarriage, a miscarriage caused by an assault in the summer of 2007.
She feared her boyfriend would leave her if he found out she'd lost the baby. Batisse, who apologized to the baby's family and her two daughters, was sentenced to five years in prison for the abduction.
But in 2009, the Ontario Court of Appeal reduced her sentence to 2.5 years, ruling the sentence was not consistent with the principles established by the Supreme Court of Canada around the sentencing of First Nations offenders.
Pilon, now senior vice-president and chief operating officer at the Sudbury hospital (since rebranded as Health Sciences North), said immediately after hearing of the abduction, he rushed to St. Joseph's.
There, he acted as the incident commander until he learned the baby had been safely recovered that evening.
“The staff in particular were so concerned and so anxious,” he said. “It was just an incredibly alarming situation.”
The alarming situation saw the hospital act to implement policy changes around security to reduce the chances a similar abduction could happen again.
Among those changes, the Hugs security system was installed. The system uses electronic bracelets on infants that activate an alarm if the child were moved out of the maternity ward without authorization.
As well, the number of entrances to the maternity ward was reduced — there used to be six at St. Joseph's — and security was increased. Visitors had to be buzzed into the unit, and rules about who could handle infants became stricter.
Officials also looked at the designs for the maternity ward for the new, then-under-construction hospital, which opened three years later, to make it more secure.
Because everyone remembers the infant abduction, the public is very accepting of these security measures, Pilon said.
But it seems that not all Canadian hospitals learned from this incident at the Sudbury hospital.
Three years ago, in a turn of events eerily similar to what happened in Sudbury, a baby was abducted from a maternity ward in Trois-Rivieres, Que.
A woman dressed in a nurse's uniform entered mother Mélissa McMahon's room, and took her day-old baby girl, Victoria.
The child was found a few hours later thanks in part to the power of social media and a woman who recognized the abductor as her former neighbour.
In terms of the Sudbury incident, Pilon said he hopes the baby — who has never been identified, but would now be celebrating her 10th birthday — and her family are doing well.
“I hope they're doing well, because as I mentioned, we all felt that that was the worst nightmare,” he said.
If you'd like to learn more about the case, check out this video Northern Life produced in 2009, after Batisse's sentence was reduced.