'Burger King Baby' Finds Birth Mom and 'Pure Joy'
The 27-year-old Pennsylvania woman whose Facebook search for her birth mother went viral says the reunion with her mother was "pure joy."
"I got the hug that I had wanted for the last 27 years, and that broke the ice," Katheryn Deprill said Monday after meeting her mother in Allentown, Pa. "She is better than anything I could've ever imagined. She is so sweet and amazing. I'm so happy."
Deprill became known as the "Burger King Baby" after she posted a photo herself on Facebook holding a sign that read, "Looking for my birth mother. She abandoned me in the Burger King bathroom only hours old, Allentown Pa. Please help me find her by sharing my post."
Deprill's photo, posted March 2 nd, was shared more than 30,000 times. One of the people who saw the photo, and the media coverage it attracted, was Deprill's mom, who contacted her daughter's attorney.
Deprill and her mother, who asked not to be identified, met for the first time Monday at the attorney's Allentown, Pa., office.
"[She] was extremely upset that she had to leave me and it wasn't what she wanted, but she felt she had no other means. She was only 17 years old," Deprill said after the meeting, according to local TV station WFMZ. "She left me somewhere she knew I'd be found. She did not want to throw me away."
Deprill was found in the bathroom of Burger King on South Fourth Street in Allentown on Sept. 15, 1986. Someone heard her crying and told staffers, who came in and found her lying on the floor.
As a child, Deprill always knew that she was adopted, but it wasn't until she was 12 years old that her parents handed her a scrapbook with newspaper articles about her.
"I opened up the first page, and there's a picture of me," Deprill told ABC News earlier this month. "Then I turned to the next page and there it was, all the newspaper articles - the Burger King baby. My mother who adopted me saved all of the newspaper articles."
Deprill's adoptive mother attended the reunion, according to WFMZ, as well as her birth mother's husband and at least one of Deprill's three children.
Deprill's lawyer, John Waldron, said that her mother became pregnant after being raped while traveling abroad. She hid the pregnancy from her parents and left the baby at Burger King so she would not have to answer questions that a hospital would have required, The Associated Press reports.
Deprill could not immediately be reached for comment.