“I’ve always been so grateful to him and my mom. They taught me not to let my circumstances define who I was.”
Hours after he was born in 1989, Freddie Figgers was set down next to a dumpster in a rural area of Florida’s panhandle.
A passerby found him alone and in distress, and called police. The infant was hospitalized with minor injuries for two days, then placed in a foster home. The couple who took him in, Nathan and Betty Figgers, lived in nearby Quincy, Fla., and already had a daughter.
Shortly after Freddie began living with them, the Figgerses — who often took in foster children — decided to adopt him.
In elementary school, Freddie Figgers said, other children would bully him and call him “dumpster baby” when they learned he had been put out with the garbage as a newborn.
“It's a rural area, so after it happened, everybody heard about it,” said Figgers, now 30. “My parents told me the truth about what happened as I grew older. I thought about it a lot as a kid, and I'd have to say it was embarrassing when I was younger.”
His life hit a turning point when he was 9, he said, when his father paid $25 for a broken 1989 Macintosh computer at a thrift shop. Nathan Figgers, who was a maintenance worker at Florida State University, brought the computer home and set it on the kitchen table so his son could tinker with it....read more
