Emmanuel Dugger was on his way home from a cigar run in Northeast Washington just before midnight Sunday when he spotted something on his neighbor’s stoop that stopped him cold. It was a small object wrapped in a brown-and-red-striped towel.

There was no movement, so he hoped it was nothing more than “a doll baby.” But something in his heart told him otherwise, so he ran inside to grab his father for help.

The two men together made the startling discovery — a tiny baby girl, naked, unconscious, and bleeding from the nose and mouth, left on the step in the middle of a freezing night. She couldn’t have been more than a week old, Dugger thought.

“I literally felt like jumping out of my body. I was just in shock. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing was a child,” said Dugger, 35, an unemployed contractor. The two took the baby inside their home and tried to warm her stiff limbs as the younger Dugger called 911 and the elder Dugger began to pray.

Police said it was unclear Monday why the baby was left at that doorstep on Channing Street, but Emmanuel Dugger said the home belongs to a schoolteacher with children of his own.

The Duggers said they were devastated when they learned that the baby girl had died.

“I was heartbroke. Still kinda torn to pieces,” said the younger Dugger. As he stood and watched the still body being taken away in the ambulance, he felt a powerful sense of grief: No child should be alone like that, with no one to be with her in what were to be her last moments.

“It took something from me,” he said.