Washington - It was 3am and Chicago high school teacher LaShonda Carter saw a Facebook message pop up from a former student.
Larresha Plummer, 18, had given birth three weeks earlier. She said she hadn't eaten in days and was running low on formula for her infant. She needed help getting to a job fair the following morning. Things sounded desperate.
"I told her I'd be there in the morning. Send me the address," Carter, 37, said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Several hours later, on Aug. 23, Carter had picked up Plummer, dropped her off at the job fair and was sitting in her car with Plummer's baby girl, Taliyah. Carter cuddled the infant and fed her, then decided to make a Facebook Live video.
"I'm holding a baby in my arms. This is not my baby. . . . Sometimes as a teacher, our job goes beyond the classroom," Carter begins. "This is the part most people don't know that educators do. It's another part of being an educator that I don't think people ever see."
The video, with her heartfelt sentiment and her expansive idea of being a high school teacher, has gotten a lot of attention on Facebook.
Andee Gaudiano-Nelson commented: "You are an amazing human being. Thank you for being an angel among us. You rock!"
Joseph Hall commented: "Your one of the best teachers on earth a child could ask for. You have gone above and beyond. Thank you."
Carter had dropped her plans for that day and made child-care arrangements for her own 10-year-old daughter so she could give Plummer a hand.
On the video, she asked her "village" to please donate clothes, diapers or other items for the baby. She said she would pick them up and deliver them to her former student.
"She's a young teenage mom, and she needs some help," Carter says in the video, as she looks down and coos at the baby. "I want my previous student to know she can be successful even though she's a teenage mother. A teenage mother does not equal failure."
After the job fair, which took about an hour, Carter took Plummer to get some food and look into benefits through the Women Infant Children program.
Plummer said she is not able to live with her own mother, who has medical problems, and is deeply grateful for her former teacher's help.
"I knew nobody else was going to take me," Plummer said of the job fair, adding that the baby's father, who is 17, works at UPS and wasn't available to help. "During my pregnancy, nobody was helping me but her. She never fails me."
Since Carter's video went big, Plummer has received several job offers, as well as clothes and supplies for Taliyah. She also started a GoFundMe page.