The Deacon's Bench
From The New York Times comes this update to a story I first posted Monday:
The mother of a baby who was left this week in an unadorned crèche inside a Roman Catholic church in Queens was found and will not face criminal prosecution, the county district attorney said on Wednesday.
The baby, who was found on Monday, remained in stable condition at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, officials said. Officially, the baby is in the custody of the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, as is routine in such cases. Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said in a statement that his office had decided not to press charges against the woman, whom he did not identify by name, after she was located and interviewed on Wednesday.
“The mother followed the spirit of New York’s ‘Safe Haven’ Law, which allows a parent to leave a child not older than 30 days with an appropriate person or in a suitable location where the parent promptly notifies an appropriate person of the child’s location,” he said. “It appears that the mother, in this case, felt her newborn child would be found safely in the church and chose to place the baby in the manger because it was the warmest place in the church, and further she returned the following morning to make certain that the baby had been found.”
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