Young Morgan Hill was always aware that she'd been adopted.
However, the 20-year-old girl from Chicago was shocked when, a couple of years ago, her adoptive mother told her what happened to her as a baby: that she'd been abandoned, put into a bin and left to die.
"She could barely get it out," Morgan told NBC, of her mum Sandi. "She was basically already crying before telling me."
Morgan's biological mother had hidden her pregnancy, delivered quietly at home and then tried to get rid of the baby so nobody would know.
Naturally, Morgan was speechless upon hearing that she'd been abandoned in such a heartless way.
"I honestly didn't know what to think when she was telling me," she said. "She had the binder of articles and just ahd me read through all of them."
Sandi had kept as many articles as she could throughout the early years of Morgan's life. Morgan read all of them, and learned that she'd been found and rescued by a construction worker named Garold Hyatt.
Taking a final load out to the bin, Garold had heard a whimper. Then he heard it again. Before long, he saw a white bin bag twitch. Nervous, he ran to the nearby hospital for help.
Three nurses came running. One of them opened the bag and saw a healthy, blue-eyed baby girl inside.
The articles went on to describe how the nurses named her Mary Grace, how authorities caught her biological mother, who was sitting in jail awaiting a trial, and how her biological father never even knew there was a baby until the mother named him in court.
Until last week, everything Morgan knew about her dramatic first days of life came from newspaper articles.
Then, after much searching, she finally got the chance to meet the man who saved her life. "I broke into tears and the first thing I said was, 'Thank you,'" Morgan said. "He said to me, 'Baby girl, you are so loved.'"
Garold came to the reunion with two special items in hand — a pin he received for his heroic actions and a photo of him holding baby Mary Grace with her adoptive parents and the nurse who first named her.
The photo is going in a binder filled with clippings that her adoptive parents have held onto all these years and Garold also gave Morgan the pin, which she hasn't taken off since.
"I could not thank him enough," Morgan said. "He gave me a chance to live a second life. Because if he didn't find me, I would not be here to help others and show soon-to-be mothers that there are so many options out there and you don't have to throw your baby away."
