Baby born after Michael starts life in Walmart parking lot
PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) — Their home full of soggy furniture and mosquitoes, Wilmer Capps was desperate to find shelter for his wife and their son Luke, born just three days after Hurricane Michael ravaged the Florida Panhandle.
So Capps, his wife Lorrainda Smith and little Luke settled in for the longest of nights in the best spot they could find: The parking lot of a Walmart store shut down by the storm.
On a starry night, mother sat in the bed of the family's pickup truck; her child sat in a car seat beside her. Dad sat in the dark and pondered how it could be that his son's first night out of a hospital could be spent outside a big-box retailer because of a lack of help.
"It really upset me, man, because I've always been the type of person who would help anyone," Capps said in an interview with The Associated Press, which found the family outside the store Monday night. An AP photographer accompanied them on a journey from the lot to a hospital and met them again at a hotel where donors later provided them a room.
Luke is healthy and so is Smith, his mom. But she said her newborn deserves better than the stormy life he's had so far.
"We had everything. Full-time job, a place to live. One day we had it all, the next we had nothing," said Smith. "This is not what I thought I'd be bringing him back to."
The story of Luke's birth is just one amid the chaos that life has become in areas of the Florida Panhandle hit hardest by Michael.
With the hurricane bearing down on their native home of Panama City, Capps and Smith sent their three other children to stay with relatives. Doctors had planned to induce labor on Oct. 11, the day after Michael made landfall between here and Mexico Beach, wiping out a wide expanse of buildings and timber.
Smith went to the hospital as planned that day, courtesy of a ride in a police car along streets crisscrossed with downed trees and powerlines. Smith said workers at Gulf Coast Regional Medical Center told her they couldn't deliver a baby that day, so she walked several miles home after being unable to find a ride back.
Anya Mayr, a Gulf Coast Regional spokeswoman, said the hospital has operated only as an emergency room and hasn't admitted patients since Michael.