A former Indiana State Police lieutenant received the shock of his life when one of his former police officers told him the identity of the new recruit.
“He said, ‘Well, you’re not going to believe this.’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘He’s sitting next to me,”’ Gene Eyster, a former Hoosier South Bend police lieutenant, told “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
“I said, ‘Who is that?’ [He replied with] “Baby Jesus. He’s sitting next to me. He’s my new guy,” he continued, saying, “It was unreal.”
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Matthew Hegdas Stewart (left) and Jean Eyster (right) (South Bend Police Department/Fox & Friends Weekend)
Eyster went on to say that the name “Baby Jesus” given to the unnamed baby was a reference to three students who rescued the baby after discovering it in a box a few days before Christmas. explained.
“We didn’t want to demean him by calling him John Doe. Baby Jesus showed up.”
That baby was Matthew Hegdus Stewart, a fully grown rookie police officer who, 24 years later, was sitting next to Eyster’s former colleague. After being rescued by the same department he currently works at, he received medical care and was taken to Child Protective Services before being placed for adoption.
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Matthew Hegdas-Stewart stands holding a photo of himself as a baby. (South Bend Police Department/Fox & Friends Weekend)
“It was a blessing,” Hegdas Stewart said of meeting Eyster. “I mean, all my life I’ve been thinking, ‘Hey, who found me? What happened?’ And more or less, that means some kind of closure for Gene.”
“As he said, for 20-odd years we wondered what happened to ‘Baby Jesus,’ and here we are. We made it.”
Eyster said he had no information about Hegdus Stewart beyond what happened that day.
Information about Hegdus Stewart was limited.His adoptive parents said they had access to the police report., But it doesn’t go much beyond that.
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Matthew Hegdas-Stewart was photographed as a baby. (South Bend Police Department/Fox & Friends Weekend)
Asked whether learning about the rescue led him to take the new job, he said that while the factor was not a conscious consideration, it may have played an unconscious role in his decision to enter law enforcement. He said that there is a sex.
“I think, probably subconsciously, that’s how I got to where I am,” he said.
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