They once called her the Burger King Baby.

Katheryn Deprill was born in the bathroom of a Burger King in Allentown, Penn., where he was wrapped in a maroon sweatshirt that was placed on top of a white plastic bag. Now a mother of three, Deprill is looking for her birth mother and has appealed to her Facebook friends for help.

"I would like to say thank you to her, that she did not throw me away," Deprill told the Morning Call.

The 27-year-old woman posted a photo of herself on Facebook, and now the post has more than 14,000 shares. The sign she holds in the photo reads: “Looking for my birth mother. She gave birth to me September 15th 1986. She abandoned me in the Burger King bathroom only hours old, Allentown PA. Please help me find her by sharing my post. Maybe she will see this. Thank you.”

Deprill learned of her past when she was in sixth grade. Knowing she was adopted, her parents shared details of the investigation surrounding her birth. As she looked through the newspaper clippings at the time, she discovered the moniker the media gave her.

"It was dropped on me," she said, "that I was known as the Burger King Baby."

Her story begins on a Monday morning 27 years ago when a Burger King employee heard a baby crying in a women’s restroom at 7 a.m. The employee asked a female customer to check the source of the sound and found the baby on the floor. The police came and the employee identified a woman who might have fit the description of the baby's mother: a woman in her early 20s with collar-length, frizzy sandy brown hair. In the meantime, Deprill was taken to a local hospital, where she was declared a healthy, full-term baby. Based on the dryness of the umbilical cord that was still attached, doctors estimated she was three hours old when she was abandoned.

Investigators dusted for fingerprints, searched trashcans and interviewed witnesses looking for a woman who recently gave birth but found nothing. Police did receive a phone call from a woman claiming that she knew the mother -- a 16-year-old woman who was 8 months pregnant around the time of the Burger King incident. The caller said the woman gave birth in the basement of her grandmother’s house. They had initially planned to drop the baby off at the hospital but at the last minute changed plans.

Following a lead that the mother lived in Easton, Penn., they interviewed a young woman at her house. She claimed she was not the mother in question.

"We proceeded to the address of the person in Easton and upon arrival there spoke with her [in reference to] the baby," then-Detective Paul Snyder said. "She denied being the mother of the baby, and that was basically the gist of the conversation.

Within three days, she was released into the foster care system, from which Brenda and Carl Hollis adopted her. The couple had two biological sons and two adopted daughters.

"My mom would always say that my brothers came from her belly and my sister and me came from her heart," Deprill said.

Now with three sons of her own, Deprill hopes her birth mother will come forward. "I really want to see her and just ask her why and see if I have any brothers and sisters and anyone that looks like me," she told WJBF.

Pennsylvania