Olive Garden Waitress Saves Baby From Allegedly Abusive Home

An Olive Garden waitress from Illinois is being hailed a hero for saving a baby from allegedly abusive parents, WPSD reports.

Jordan Cooper was working a shift at one of the restaurant’s chains in Kentucky when she noticed something terribly off about a family she was serving. The parents were accompanied by two young kids, an adolescent girl and a baby, who she says had a “severely beaten” face. Cooper, who is pregnant herself, kicked into action and started a chain of events that would lead to justice.

Secretly in cahoots with another family dining in, the waitress pretended to take a photo of their table while actually sneaking in a snapshot of the suspicious-looking couple. She then slipped her number to the patrons so they could send her the picture.

The mom-to-be says they started to get suspicious, and quickly paid their check and got up and left. But not before Cooper followed them out, took down their license plate and called 911.

Her efforts didn’t stop there. The woman then went home and turned to Facebook for help identifying the couple. Her post and picture, which has since been taken down, received thousands of shares.

“Tonight, working at Paducah Olive Garden, I had a couple that came in with a child that was severely beaten in the face. Her face was black and blue all over,” she wrote in the Facebook post. “The guy in this picture was force-feeding her food down her throat, and grabbing her by her throat and getting in her face.”

“I couldn’t serve because my heart hurt so bad,” she says.

Her post quickly spiralled into a series of events when a former classmate, who’s now a 911 dispatcher, saw it and decided to do his own digging. Once he used social media to uncover the identity of the adults in the photo, he contacted the local police department.

Eventually, the two children were removed from the home and the adults, who have been identified as Jessica Woodworth and Mark Lee Pierce, were arrested on charges of aggravated child abuse and neglect.

And it’s all thanks to a waitress who refused to ignore kids so clearly in harm’s way.

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