Cop And Wife Who Adopted Heroin Addict's Baby Guests At SOTU

Editor's Note: This story was originally published Dec. 8, 2017. We're bringing it back again after the Holets family were guests of First Lady Melania Trump at Tuesday's State of the Union Address.

ALBUQUERQUE, NM — A police officer in Albuquerque could have arrested the obviously pregnant woman he found about to shoot up heroin in broad daylight near a convenience store last September. Instead, he offered to adopt her unborn child.

Crystal Champ, 35, was eight months’ pregnant when Officer Ryan Holets found her. Video from his body camera shows him lecturing her, spelling out the consequences of the addicted woman’s actions.

“You’re going to kill your baby,” Holets said. “Why do you have to be doing that stuff? It’s going to ruin your baby.”

That comment cut to the core, Champ told CNN earlier this month at an Albuquerque homeless camp where she lives. She said she has battled addiction since she was a teenager, had tried to stop using and finally decided there was no way out and gave her life over to drugs. She had been homeless for two years when Holets found her.

For 11 minutes, Holets talked to Champ to help her understand how her heroin use could seriously harm her unborn child. She told him she had prayed someone would adopt her baby.

The video above by Elyse Samuels, Kelyn Soong of The Washington Post tells part of the story.

And that’s when Holets “became a human being instead of a police officer,” Champ told CNN.

He offered to adopt Champ’s child. Her prayers had been answered. Holets sees it that way, too, and so does his wife, Rebecca, who endorsed her husband’s impromptu offer to give the baby a loving family.

"I was led by God to take the chance," Holets told CNN. "God brought us all together. I really don't have any other way to explain it."

The baby, named Hope by her adoptive parents, was born Oct. 12, a month early. She was born addicted to opiates and went through a painful detox process that included withdrawal symptoms and methadone treatment. It was painful to watch, Holets said, but after a week and a half of treatment, little Hope went home to her new family.

The couple, who also have a 10-month-old, are deeply religious and private by nature. They were reluctant to share the story, but decided it was a way to put a human face on the drug problem, Ryan Holets told The Washington Post.

“We didn’t do this to have a story,” Holets told The Washington Post. “That is entirely not why we did it, but after talking to some close friends whom I trust, we realized this was a way to put a face on the drug problem and maybe encourage other people to adopt.”

Champ may consider Holets her angel, but Sgt. Jim Edison of the Albuquerque Police Department calls him a hero and nominated him for CNN’s “Beyond the Call of Duty” series. He didn’t tell Holets he was doing it, but told The Post that in 10 years as a cop, he’s never seen anything quite like the officer’s selfless act.

“This guy wasn’t just taking a call, he was changing everybody’s life around him,” he said. “It’s so unselfish. I was just humbled.”

There will be no crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for the suddenly expanded family, Ryan Holets told The Washington Post. That was one of his conditions when he agreed to be interviewed for the CNN series. He doesn’t want any stain on the act.

“We don’t want anybody to say we’ve used this occasion to enrich ourselves,” he said.

Opiate-addicted babies like Hope are born every 25 minutes in America, according to a 2016 study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, the medical term for a baby exposed to opioid abuse in the womb, climbed 300 percent from 1999-2013 among 28 states reporting data to the CDC. During the study period, NAS births increased from 1.5 to 6 cases per 1,000 hospital births.

Like Hope, many of them go through withdrawal symptoms — as severe as an adult getting off opioids might — and need methadone treatment. Their sleep patterns are abnormal, they cry and they don’t always want to eat.

Hope’s future is unknown.

“She’s gaining weight, eating well, sleeping well,” Ryan Holets told The Post. “We’re just praying and hoping for the best for her. As far as development goes, we won’t know the effects until she’s older.”

Champ’s farewell to Hope was “super emotional,” Rebecca Holets told CNN. She told the baby she loved her, “and then she turns to me and says, ‘Take care of her for me.’ And I said, ‘I will take good care of her and you take good care of yourself.' "

When Hope is old enough, the Holetses plan to tell her about the circumstances of her adoption. And they’ll remain in contact with Champ, who Holets said is still using and remains homeless. His goal is to get her and her partner into rehab treatment, and they’ve discussed some willingness to give getting clean another shot, Holets told The Post.

Champ told CNN she hopes Hope will understand that adoption by a loving family was her best chance for a happy life.

"She needs to have a safe environment and a stable life and be able to grow and be nurtured and be safe and secure and all of these things I can't give her right now," Champ told CNN.

She described the Holetses as “a light in the world.”

"There needs to be more people like Ryan and his wife and their family in this world," she told CNN.

Photo and video from The Washington Post