Family with newborn shelters at Walmart

Associated Press

PANAMA CITY, Fla.

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 his mother. 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.”

Unable to stay at their storm-damaged home amid oppressive heat and bugs, Capps settled on the Walmart parking lot because they were low on gas and were fearful of driving at night with a curfew in place. The store has a reputation for letting travelers sleep in the parking lot overnight, and Capps knew it.

“I had no choice, [Luke] would have had a heatstroke. When he started acting like he was getting sick from the heat and wouldn’t eat, that’s when we went to Walmart,” Capps said. “There was kind of a breeze there. There was no bugs biting us. I said, ‘We’re all right now.”