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Corina Knoll

Abandoned as a baby, new mom gets a priceless gift

Last updated Sunday, May 13, 2012 - 7:38am

I do not know what clothes I was wearing. Whether I'd been left in a cradle or with any note of explanation. I do not know if I cried or lay still. Looked around or slept. Minutes may have gone by. Or hours.

All the official record says is that, at about 2 months old, I was abandoned at the Nambu police station in Busan, South Korea.

Labeled a "foundling," I was taken to an orphanage and given a birth date and a name -- Dong Hee Ahn. It was 1978. After a year and a half, I was transferred to a foster home in Seoul, where a social worker noted:

"Her all action development progress was slower than same aged children due to being cared at orphanage for long."

Features, Adoption, Children, Mother's Day Read more Comments

Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times/MCT
Student Breana Hill, 15, hugs her mother, Lichelle, outside of Gardena High School in Gardena, California, Tuesday, January 18, 2011. Two 10th grade students were wounded, one of them critically, when a loaded gun went off in a classmate's backpack, authorities said.

Parents say school where gun went off failed in making sure their children were safe

Corina Knoll, McClatchy Newspapers, Shan Li, Tony Barboza

Last updated Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 1:32pm

GARDENA, Calif. -- Your children are safe, they were told. Security will be beefed up, and the school's quick response was evidence of a safer campus.

But the words did little to reassure the dozens of angry parents who filled Gardena High School's auditorium Wednesday, a day after two students were wounded -- one critically--when a gun that a 17-year-old youth was carrying in a backpack discharged. Any notion of safety at the Los Angeles-area school had been severely undermined, and the remarks from school and district officials calmed few.

"You guys failed us, and you failed our kids," a disgusted parent said.

Schools, Guns, Safety Read more Comments