Sick Infant Stolen From Texas Hospital

A woman posing as a medical worker kidnapped a three-day-old infant from a hospital early Saturday, police said.

Mychael Darthard-Dawodu was last seen at 1:20 a.m. at Covenant Lakeside Hospital when a woman wearing blue and flower print hospital scrubs and a gray hooded jacket took her and drove off in a pickup truck, police said.

Hospital surveillance video showed the woman with the jacket hood pulled around her head and holding a purse as she walked through the lobby.

Lt. Scott Hudgens said the baby was jaundiced but he did not have any other information on her medical condition.

The woman may have had a male accomplice, Hudgens said.

"At this point we don't have any reason to believe that the family knew the suspect," Hudgens said.

The abductor went into the mother's room several times before the baby was taken, said Gwen Stafford, senior vice president of Covenant Health System. The woman told the mother the baby needed treatment, Stafford said.

"I think there was more than one attempt," Stafford said. "I'm trying to verify if it was two or three times."

Hudgens said the mother alerted someone that her baby was gone within about 15 minutes.

At a news conference later Stafford said it was "unclear" whether the kidnapper was wearing a name badge.

"I don't think that our staff had ever seen her," she said.

The newborn was wearing a monitoring device but it was not clear if the device included a global positioning system beacon.

"We have a very good and sophisticated security" system, she added.

Later she declined to comment on what sort of system is used with newborns.

"I don't want to compromise the security system," Stafford said.

The mother is "distraught, and like us, praying for the safe return of her little girl," Stafford said.

Hudgens implored the woman and her possible accomplice to drop the baby off some place safe so that she could get treatment for her jaundice.

"That's our main concern right now, is the safety of this child," he said.

The FBI and county authorities were looking for a red Dodge pickup with tinted windows.

Jaundice is a common complication in newborns that causes a yellowing of the skin because of a buildup of pigment in the blood.

The abduction was the second in Lubbock in less than a year. In June a woman in medical scrubs began visiting a mother's room at a different hospital, asking questions about the days-old baby and then offering to drop by their home with a swing and some baby clothes, the mother told police then.

The woman visited the mother's home a few days later and fled with the newborn while the mother was momentarily distracted with her 2-year-old son.

A tip led to the woman's whereabouts the next day and she took police to an apartment complex carport where she had left the 5-day-old girl in a car seat in 100-plus degree weather.