Abandoned Baby Was Initially Mistaken for a Doll. Then the Man Who Found Him Was Asked to Adopt: ‘One Surprise After Another'

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"We were in no position to start a family or have a baby enter our lives at all, nor were we thinking about it," says Pete Mercurio — then fate intervenedNEED TO KNOW
In 2000, social worker Danny Stewart made headlines when he found an abandoned infant at a New York City subway station
Stewart and his then-boyfriend, Pete Mercurio, became the boy's foster parents and eventually adopted him
A new animated short film, 18 Months, tells a dramatized version of their storyThere's no wrong way to build a family.
That's the message Danny Stewart and his husband, Pete Mercurio, are hoping to spread with a new film 18 Months, inspired by the couple's true story of unexpectedly becoming parents after Stewart found an abandoned baby in a New York City subway station 25 years ago.
The six-minute stop-motion animated short from the nonprofit Second Nurture, created by Klick Health and animated by Zombie Studio, with music by Jamute, aims to ignite broader conversations around adoption and lessen stigma.
It's also put Stewart, Mercurio and their son back in the spotlight as they share an update on their headline-making story. Back in August 2000, the last thing on the couple's minds was raising a child.
'Not a whiff of it,' Mercurio, 57, tells PEOPLE. 'It was one surprise after another in terms of how it all played out.'
Around 8 p.m on Aug. 28, 2000, Stewart, a social worker, was on his way to meet his boyfriend, a writer and graphic designer, for dinner. They'd been together for three years and lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with a partition splitting the living room to provide a sleep space for their then-roommate.
'We had no resources. We were in debt,' Mercurio says. 'We were in no position to start a family or have a baby enter our lives at all, nor were we thinking about it.'
But that night, Stewart saw a box with what looked like a doll in it on the 14th Street subway platform — and was shocked when he looked closer and saw movement.
He quickly notified authorities and the infant was swept away. Stewart was celebrated as a hero — and interviewed by the likes of CNN and the BBC — before interest in the story initially subsided.
That, thought Stewart, now 59, was that. A shiny moment in the news and then back to his regular life.
Then things took a wild turn when Stewart was asked to provide testimony at a hearing to sever the baby boy's biological parental rights so that the child, then called "Daniel Ace Doe," could be placed in a foster home. (The birth parents never came forward; a DNA test many years later revealed he was Pacific Islander.)
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Little baby Doe seemed destined for a life in the foster care system and perhaps adoption down the line until a judge stepped in.
At a certain point during the hearing, the judge asked Stewart to stay until the end of the proceedings. That's when she asked an unexpected question: Would he be interested in adopting the baby? He stammered out a yes.
It was, says Mercurio, 'The question that changed our lives forever.'
The judge got the couple into a short-lived pilot program that allowed them to quickly become foster parents and eventually adopt the boy, whom they named Kevin Stewart-Mercurio. While it was initially a challenge for Mercurio and Stewart, they quickly adapted: Their roommate moved out, and Kevin moved in.
A same-sex couple raising a child of a different race, they were generally accepted and supported by their New York City community, they say — though Mercurio admits he was waiting for some sort of pushback or challenge to their adoption during what became a two-year process.
'They're going to see two men on the forms and we're going to get delayed,' Mercurio says of his fears back then. 'None of that happened because the judge was so in charge of everything and wanted this to happen.'
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Kevin proved to be a motivated and talented boy who excelled academically and socially. The family was open about his origin story, and they shared it with his classmates.
'We wanted to be honest with him,' Stewart says. 'It was always about love and being found.'
Mercurio put together a short picture book when Kevin was about 5 as a way to tell the story of how their family came to be, and the dads would read it to Kevin every night.
'Is this about me?' he asked one night. When Mercurio told him it was, Kevin wanted him to read it again.
The next time it was his turn at show-and-tell, he brought the book and shared it with his classmates.
'He owned the story after that, which was really comforting for us that it wasn't a traumatic thing for him,' Mercurio says.
He says the couple only encountered one piece of hate mail about them being gay and questioning how they could become a real family. But he knows this sort of discrimination has dogged other gay couples.
Naturally, as Kevin grew older, he began to ask questions about his background.
'I think in his middle years, just past elementary school as he was entering his teen years, where he seemed to be like 'Who am I?' 'What is my identity?' ' Mercurio says.
Their family was also not as well-off as some others in their neighborhood.
'I just got emotional because I remember feeling at the time that if Kevin had been adopted by one of these families, he could have had all that,' Mercurio says. 'But I don't feel that way now.'
Stewart says he believes his son struggled a bit with a sense of being alone.
'I think it came to a head in college when he said there were differences not only racially, but also financially and class-wise,' Stewart says. 'As a parent, I wished we could have prepared him for the racial discrimination he felt when he went off to college.'
Kevin would tell them how sometimes when he sat down on the bus, people wouldn't sit next to him. Or when he went to school in Philadelphia and would take the train home to New York City — if he was late, he avoided running to the train while wearing his hoodie and carrying his backpack.
'That was just heartbreaking stuff we did not prepare him for,' Mercurio says.
Still, Kevin has thrived.
In 2022, he graduated from Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia, where he double majored in computer science and mathematics. Last year he moved to Pittsburgh and works as a junior software developer at a creative agency.
The couple says he supports their projects, like with 18 months, but prefers to stay private with his life.
Looking back at their family's journey, Stewart says, 'Everything lined up just so perfectly."
Call it serendipity, fate or "some higher power that just was leading things to happen in this particular way," he says.
"It just gives me chills."
Read the original article on People
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