The Reborn doll named Ainslie had been covered with a blanket with its feet sticking out and left in a car seat on a 90-degree day in the parking lot of the Keene Wal-Mart when a passerby became alarmed and alerted police
By Ethan Dewitt | The Keene Sentinel | August 18, 2016
KEENE, New Hampshire -- It all started because Ainslie's feet were sticking out. She had been covered with a blanket and left in her car seat on a 90-degree day in the parking lot of the Keene Wal-Mart, and she was almost invisible. But a passerby saw feet poking through the blanket, and the bottle on the seat, and she called the police.
When a Keene officer arrived, a police report would later detail, the situation appeared clear: a locked car on a hot day, windows up, pacifier on the seat, and those feet, sticking out ominously. Lt. Jason Short decided there wasn't a moment to lose. He smashed the window with the baton, removed Ainslie from the backseat, and called for an ambulance.
Ainslie was pale, with splotchy skin, mouth slightly ajar, eyes closed. For about a minute, Short attempted rescue breaths, a small crowd of onlookers collecting around the scene.
Then he stopped, resigning himself to a discomforting reality: The effort was going nowhere. Ainslie was never going to catch her breath.
Ainslie, he determined, was a doll.
Several hundred feet away, Ainslie's owner, Carolynne Seiffert, was sitting in Super Cuts for a hair appointment when an officer came in, looking for the vehicle's owner. She ran to the parking lot to assess the damage, flustered. It was a new car, and she was angry.
She felt she had done nothing wrong.
"I was pissed," she recalled, a week after the incident. "I thought I had done the right thing by covering (Ainslie) up."
With a police car, emergency response vehicles, and a growing group of spectators, the situation in the Wal-Mart parking lot bordered on the absurd. But the figurine in Seiffert's car was far from ordinary itself.
Ainslie is a reborn doll, a high-price, hand-sculpted, silicone figurine bearing a striking resemblance to a real baby. She has wrinkled hands, soft and mottled skin, and a tuft of reddish brown hair that peeks out from a headband. She wears real baby clothes, and weighs 10 pounds, 7 ounces.
As a reborn, Ainslie is part of a movement that originated in the 1930s but has risen in prominence in recent years, spurring breathless headlines and public fascination. Once a niche craft, the dolls now proliferate Facebook pages and star in magazines.
There are many reasons people get the dolls, according to those who make them. Many want to collect and admire; some seek the emotional simulation of holding a newborn; others use them as aides for patients with Alzheimer's or autism.
Seiffert has a deeply personal motivation: She lost her son. When Bryan was two and a half years old, he was diagnosed with Hunter's Disease, a rare strain of Mucopolysaccharidoses (MPS) caused by his body's inability to produce necessary enzymes. Doctors predicted he would make it to only 15 years old; he lived to be 20, dying in 2006. Seiffert had cared for him every year of his life.
In 2005, with the end approaching, she bought her first reborn dolls. Seiffert, who lives in Brattleboro with her husband and works for Vermont Yankee, wasn't going to have more children. But she was drawn to the dolls' lifelike beauty, and she wanted something to cuddle.
"I loved the little faces on them," she said. "There was just something about them."
The dolls arrived in the throes of a dark and painful chapter in her life. She tried counseling, but it didn't work out. The reborns gave her a comfort she couldn't find elsewhere, something tangible in a period where little made sense.
So she bought more of them: boys and girls, newborns and three-month-olds. She frequented Facebook pages, websites, forums -- anywhere the movement presented itself. She commissioned a doll to look like her son: "Little Bryan."
As the dolls began to accumulate, her fascination evolved from simple coping mechanism to passionate hobby. It isn't cheap: The average vinyl reborn costs between $100 and $400, Seiffert says, though they can be bought used for under $150.
"I'm still employed: I have to be to keep paying for all this," she said, laughing.
Today, she has between 35 and 40 reborns, split between her house in Brattleboro and a home in Hinsdale where she cares for her father. She says she buys about two a month. But she finds faults with many of them; they're too small or they don't feel the way she thought they would.
She decided she was ready for the next step in reborn realism: silicone, a much more expensive type of doll that mimics the weight and texture of a baby with striking accuracy.
Seiffert bought Ainslie from a doll nursery for $2,300, just a week before the parking lot incident.
According to manufacturers, the majority of customers, like Seiffert, are collectors. But their reasons for collecting vary.
Debra Jadick, a reborn artist based out of Alexandria, Ala., said that of the hundreds of orders she has filled, only a handful have been for what she called "memorial babies," made in the image of a deceased child.
Jadick, who works from home and makes about 85 to 100 dolls a year, said many of her customers are interested in the artistic value, but others are people who can't have children or whose children have grown up.
"Do people get emotionally attached to the dolls? To put it mildly, yes," she said. Many of her clients, she said, get the dolls specifically to form those attachments, often seeking her help along the way.
When they put in their orders, she noted, they give her guidance through each step of making the reborn. After purchasing them, some clients call her up with concerns about bonding efforts with the dolls.
For Jadick, the craft is artistic, not emotional.
"My passion comes from making them," she said. "I don't collect dolls and I never had them."
Jadick said she understands the passions of some who buy them. She's seen clients grow emotionally over-invested, becoming undone. But she's also seen the benefits of ownership, with some of her dolls helping clients' children through the trauma of losing a sibling.
As the dolls' popularity has increased, so have the police incidents.
In September 2015, police in Dudley, England, broke a window after discovering an "extremely life-like doll" locked inside a motor vehicle on a hot day, according to the Daily Telegraph. Similar situations have been reported in Nottinghamshire, England; Hoboken, N.J.; and Oakland, Calif. In many cases, police departments have paid for the windows they broke, according to news reports.
The incidents, isolated but often prominent, have arisen as the movement itself has become more organized. There are trade publications, national competitions and the International Reborn Doll Artists Group, which began hosting annual conferences in Orlando, Fla., in 2005.
Reborns have also caught the attention of a few psychiatrists, weighing in on the positives and negatives of developing strong attachments to dolls.
Speaking to ABC News in 2009, Dr. Sue Varna, of the NYU School of Medicine, said cuddling a fake baby could produce some of the same chemical effects for mothers as cuddling a real one, although no studies have been done specifically on dolls.
Dr. Gail Saltz, writing in 2008 in a post on Today.com, said that the dolls could also help with handling grief, calling them a potential "transitional object" for grieving mothers, akin to a stuffed animal for a child.
But both psychiatrists warned of the risk of women over-immersing themselves within the world of the doll, causing problems if it becomes used as a prop for social interaction.
For her part, Seiffert says she knows the dolls are dolls, and she appreciates them as much for their artistic value as for their psychological benefits.
"I'm not a fruit loop," she said. "This is just what I love."
On July 23, Seiffert was on her way to show Ainslie to a friend, when she made her brief stop just outside Wal-Mart. Half an hour later she returned to her car, walking onto a frenzied scene.
Seiffert said the visuals of emergency vehicles, the shattered glass in the backseat, and the gawking group of bystanders tainted her initial joy at having recently gotten Ainslie.
She isn't happy with the police response; she said she was smirked at by an officer interviewing her, and that the police never apologized. She spent several weeks pressing police to pay for the window, which she said costs hundreds of dollars to repair.
Keene Police Chief Brian Costa sees the situation differently; it was an unfortunate incident for all parties, he said, but one that could have been avoided.
"We are not an un-empathetic police department; we know the tragedy that she's been through," he said, referencing Seiffert's experience with her son, which he said she raised to police in an email. "But there's an opportunity here to educate people on acting more responsibly (with reborn dolls)."
Costa said the episode had taken an emotional toll on the responding officer. A report written by Lt. Short appears to bear that out.
Approaching the vehicle after responding to the call, Short said the scene inside looked impossibly realistic. Seeing the car seat and the bottle, and feeling the heat of the windows with his hand, he felt he didn't have a choice but to smash the glass.
"I did not feel I could waste any time, literally every second counted," he wrote in the report.
As Short began took the baby out, he wrote, it felt very real: the skin was hot to the touch and the baby was heavy.
He unbuckled the seat restraint to take Ainslie out and her arms raised slightly, as if to take a breath, according to the report. Short's mind raced to his two daughters, and the first breaths they took when they were delivered.
Panic began to set in.
"Come on baby, cry," Short said aloud, according to his report. "I truly believed at this point the infant was likely dead," he added.
After a few unsuccessful rescue breaths, Short noticed something odd: The baby didn't have earlobes.
Moments later he and a nurse in the crowd concluded the baby was a doll.
Keene police Sgt. James Cemorelis, a second responder to the scene, was also taken in by the doll's appearance; when he first arrived, he second-guessed Short's assessment, he wrote in a separate report.
There was a "real car seat, a real blanket, real clothes, a real bottle, a real pacifier," he wrote. "In essence the entire scene was made to look as real as possible."
Costa said the accounts provided evidence that Seiffert should have been more responsible.
He said the department is planning to pay for the window, but only after having a sit-down discussion with Seiffert, which was set for Friday.
In an email Friday, Seiffert confirmed that the meeting had taken place and that Keene Police had told her they would compensate her.
Seiffert says she understands the anguish the situation caused, and she's apologized. But she still doesn't feel she was treated well, after initial attempts to get the window paid for were met with resistance.
Looking ahead, she says the incident has made her nervous of the treatment she might receive the next time she takes Ainslie out in public.
"I don't want people to judge me for what I enjoy," she said. "You have not gone through the loss of a child -- you don't know what that's like. It's devastating."
If she does take Ainslie out from now on, she'll be cautious.
"I've learned my lesson," she said. "She'll be very tightly wrapped."
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