Escondido sergeant Jeff Valdivia thought a sickly 6-week-old girl would die if she wasn’t taken away from a drug house in 2000. Last month, he pinned a deputy badge on her at her police academy graduation ceremony 22 years after rescuing her

On Nov. 2, 2000, Escondido police officer Jeff Valdivia was called in to help with the arrest of a parole violator at a known drug house in south Escondido.

Valdivia was in his mid-20s and just four years out of the police academy. 

Inside one room, he found a sickly 6-week-old girl that had barely been fed after her birth and three pounds below her birth weight, along with her teenage mother, a daily crystal meth user, and a used methamphetamine pipe.  (crystal meth capital of the world, Escondido California, about 20 miles north of San Diego)

Valdivia had never taken a child into protective custody before, but he feared that if he left the baby with her mother that day, she wouldn’t survive. So with the support of his fellow officers and a juvenile detective, Valdivia decided to file the paperwork that would forever change the life trajectory of the baby who became Natalie Young. But he never knew how important that decision was until six weeks ago.

Natalie was 6 years old in 2007 when her family left San Diego for Colorado Springs, in search of more affordable housing and the small-town life, with good schools, plenty of churches, horses to ride and lots of pine trees. In Colorado, Natalie gradually began to thrive.

Over time, Natalie’s health improved and she became very strong, eventually earning a black belt in tae kwon do.  

Inspired by her daughter’s passion for law enforcement, Shelley Young enrolled in the El Paso County Sheriff’s academy herself about five years ago. She graduated and has been working for the department as a dispatcher ever since. It was through her work with the sheriff’s department in August that she finally found Valdivia. She called the records department at the Escondido Police Department and asked records technician Sandra Ferrer if it was possible to find a case file from Nov. 2, 2000. Intrigued and moved by Natalie’s backstory, Ferrer was able to retrieve the record from a digital database, and she immediately tracked down Valdivia with the news.

“Sandra approaches me in the hallway with a report in her hand and said, ‘Do you remember this?’ I see the name of the birth mother and I said, ‘Yeah, I remember this case really well,’” Valdivia said. “Then she said, ‘Well, that little girl was adopted, and I’ve been talking to her adoptive mom and she’s about to graduate from a sheriff’s academy.”  

That’s when Valdivia — now the sergeant for Escondido Police’s community-oriented COPPS division — got a call out of the blue from Natalie’s adoptive mother Shelley Young, who had recently tracked him down through a records search. She told him that Natalie had grown up to become a healthy and happy 22-year-old who was about to graduate from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Academy in their hometown of Colorado Springs.

Shelley and her husband, Jeff Young, wanted Valdivia to know that his decision to save her had inspired their daughter to become an officer, and they wondered if he would fly out to pin on Natalie’s deputy badge at her graduation ceremony on Sept. 23.

Valdivia was stunned by the news and said it was the first time in his 26-year career that he’d had the opportunity to see the long-term results of his work.

Natalie said that from the time she was old enough to ask her parents where she came from, they told her the story of her rescue by a police officer. By the time she was 8 years old, she knew she wanted to follow in this unknown officer’s footsteps someday. “It changed my whole life and I wanted to change other people’s lives in the same way.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-16/he-rescued-her-from-a-drug-den-as-a-baby-22-years-later-he-pins-deputy-badge-on-her

and that is the coolest news I've seen in a long time