5-Month-Old Baby's Identity Stolen
BOTHELL, Wash., Oct. 12, 2004 — -- Andrew is a healthy 5-month-old, but according to bill collectors, just three weeks after he was born he walked into an Edmonds family clinic on his own, got treated for a lumbar disc displacement and was given a narcotic to help ease the pain.
His mother and father got a $94 bill in the mail for the treatment and prescription.
"To receive the mail with his name on it was very bizarre," his mother, Katrina, told ABC News affiliate KOMO-TV in Seattle.
It is bizarre, and Andrew may be the youngest person ever to become a victim of identity theft.
He didn't even have a Social Security number, but someone used his first and middle names — though without the "w" in Andrew — included his correct mailing address, and got the clinic to prescribe them drugs.
"As a parent you feel violated when your child ... all you want to do as a parent is protect your child. And to find somebody has taken advantage of a 3-week-old baby is hard to understand," Andrew's father, John, told KOMO-TV.
They don't understand how it could have happened, but what they and police believe is that someone might have lifted Andrew's information from the hospital in Kirkland where he was born, and that bothers this family even more, because of the amount of information that was available from hospital records.
"Not only the child's name — first, middle and last — but the parents', plus the parents' Social Security numbers and mother's maiden name for each of us," said John. "Everything needed to establish a fake ID."
Police in Edmonds said they are following strong leads.
The $94 bill Andrew got with a tersely written message that the account would soon go to a collection agency has since been dismissed. And though Edmonds police said they have identified a suspect in the case, they have not yet arrested or found the person.
"And until they're able to locate him and bring him in for questioning and find out what the link was, we're never going to know," John said.
