Baby Stolen From Mother by Nurse Impersonator

A woman posing as a nurse in a white lab smock abducted a baby boy from his mother’s arms in a maternity ward and vanished through a fire exit, officials at Grand View Hospital said Saturday.

Officials said they had no clues in Friday’s abduction of 1-day-old Phillip Worthington despite the offer of a $5,000 reward for his safe return and calls from several people who responded to a public appeal for information.

“Part of the mystery is we can’t come up with any kind of motive from any side--the family, the hospital, anything,” hospital spokesman Scott Campbell said.

“We’ve been looking in every possible area for leads, like past patients who had a baby die in birth, but we haven’t come up with anything,” he said. “We don’t have any indication it was anything aimed at this particular family.”

Search Unsuccessful

Police in the town, about 20 miles north of Philadelphia, said their search had been unsuccessful. But Campbell said authorities had received several calls from people who believed they might be able to identify the abductor based on her description.

A woman, described as heavyset and in her 40s with dark blond medium-length hair that may have been a wig, entered the second-floor maternity ward at the hospital Friday and went into the room of Barbara Worthington of Silverdale, police said.

Bucks County Dist. Atty. Alan Rubenstein said the woman, who was wearing a white lab coat, claimed the baby was needed for an examination and walked off with him.

Mrs. Worthington, who had given birth Thursday morning to 6-pound, 5-ounce Phillip, was talking at the time with her pastor, the Rev. Mark Wimmer of St. Andrews Evangelical Lutheran Church in Perkasie.

Pastor Became Suspicious

“Almost as soon as the woman left the room, the reverend became suspicious,” Rubenstein said. “He heard a door close across the hall. He knew that was an exit.”

Wimmer looked for the woman and alerted hospital employees, Rubenstein said.

The mother was not suspicious of the woman’s request to examine the baby because he had jaundice and had been circumcised, Rubenstein said.

Campbell issued a plea for the abductor to provide the baby with prompt medical attention.

“We urge the abductor to please take the child to a health care facility or a hospital where it can get the medical attention it needs,” he said.