JANET BANICO, A 26-year-old bank teller, had already picked out a name for her daughter: Jharian Ezekiah.

The first-time mother, however, never got a chance to name her newborn baby after two women whom she met by chance in a passenger jeepney last week kidnapped her, took the infant and then dumped her in front of a church in Manila.

Banico, a resident of Poblacion, Mandaluyong City, told the Inquirer that she should not have gone with the women when they offered to bring her to a hospital after she felt labor pains. “I really thought they were going to help me. I never thought there were people like them,” she said in Filipino. In the complaint she filed yesterday at the Manila Police District Women’s and Children’s Protection Desk (MPD-WCPD), Banico said her ordeal began on Thursday at around 8 a.m. while she was on a Manila-bound passenger jeepney. “I was on my way to have my checkup at the Metropolitan Hospital [in Sta. Cruz, Manila] and possibly have myself confined because I felt I was about to give birth,” she said.

According to Banico, she was alone because her partner, Jerome Cabagnuson, was at work. On her way to the hospital, she said she started bleeding and decided to alight from the jeepney to flag down a taxi cab that would take her to the nearest hospital. “Two women alighted from the same jeepney and offered to help me because they said they noticed that I was bleeding. They asked where I was going and when I told them that I was walking to the nearby hospital, they said the hospital would not treat me,” Banico said, adding that the women offered to take her to the Metropolitan Hospital instead. She said she rejected their offer and flagged down a taxicab.

 The two women, however, got into the cab with her and insisted on coming with her to the medical facility. Along the way, Banico said one of them made her smell something allegedly to ease her labor pains. She added that she passed out afterward and when she woke up, she was in a room, lying on a bed which did not look anything like a hospital bed. Banico said she saw another woman wearing a nurse’s uniform holding a newborn baby. The nurse then told her that she had given birth to a baby girl. She added that she asked the woman where she was and was told that she was at the Metropolitan Hospital. When the victim said it did not look like she was in a hospital, the nurse pointed to Banico’s gown which bore the facility’s logo. Banico narrated that she asked the nurse for her cell phone so that she could tell her partner where she was. The woman agreed but insisted on listening to the conversation by putting the phone on speaker mode. After two days, Banico said she asked the nurse why her partner had not visited her at all. She also insisted on going home.

 “They informed me that I could not be discharged yet because my bill had not yet been settled and I had nobody to fetch me,” she told the police. She said the nurse gave her a pill which put her to sleep. When she woke up, she found herself lying in front of the Sta. Cruz church from across Plaza Sta. Cruz, with people milling around her. “They thought I was dead. I was lying on my side and they thought I was dead because of all that blood on the hospital gown I was wearing,” she said. She later learned that it was around 1 a.m. Sunday. Banico said there was no sign of her shoes or her bag which contained P18,000 in cash and her cell phone. Worse, her baby was nowhere to be found. Some of the people who found her took pity on her, she added. They gave her money so that she could go home and a change of clothes. She also called up her husband who had been looking for her for days after he failed to find her at the Metropolitan Hospital. MPD-WCPD head Chief Insp. Anita Araullo told the Inquirer that the incident was the first of its kind to be reported to her office. “We will find the suspects. We are conducting follow-up operations right now. We cannot let this happen again, “ she said. “We have artist’s sketches of these women. They will be arrested and hopefully, we can still recover the baby,” she added.