Articles labeled: child abandonment

Nebraska might want to rethink its “safe haven” law. This case marks the 17th child abandoned since the law went into effect just 3 months ago.

The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services said the girl is from Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the Missouri River from Omaha. She was left at Creighton University Medical Center on Tuesday afternoon, and her case was reported to Iowa authorities.

[The law] was meant to protect the lives of infants by letting a parent leave them at any state-licensed hospital without fear of prosecution, but the law doesn’t set any age limit.

The law’s legal protections might not apply since the girl is not from Nebraska, said Todd Landry, director of the department’s division of Children and Family Services.

“We have made a formal report of the abandonment to the Iowa child abuse hotline,” Landry said in a statement. “We are working with the Iowa Department of Human Services to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.”

A two-year-old was found wandering a Wal-Mart in Frankfort, Indiana, after he was abandoned there by his mother. Police found a handwritten note in the child’s backpack.

“The letter suggests that he was abandoned. Nobody has come forward to report him missing.”

Deputy Police Chief Randy Emery said the note, written in Spanish, is believed to have been penned by the boy’s mother. In it, she states that the family moved to the United States from Guatemala about a year ago and that her husband left them 10 months ago.

The letter says she does not have the financial means to feed him or provide shelter. His backpack contained a baby bottle, “sippy” cups, diapers and toys, Emery said.

We actually prefer Target over Wal-Mart when it comes to child abandonment options.

An infant girl was left in a dumpster in McPherson, Kansas, and fortunately someone found her alive and well.

The 18-year-old mother of an infant found alive Tuesday in a McPherson trash Dumpster has become the focus of a police investigation into the girl’s disappearance.

The 6-week-old baby was discovered shortly after 1 p.m. on some plastic bags in a Dumpster in an alley two blocks from where she lives. The alley is between Maple and Walnut streets and between Hill and Woodside streets, McPherson Police Chief Dennis Shaw said.

Her cries were heard by officers and Emergency Medical Service workers searching the area in northwest McPherson.

“It appeared some care had been taken to place the baby in the Dumpster,” Shaw said.

We’ve all periodically read stories about a mom leaving her kids home alone while she goes off for the weekend with her boyfriend or whatever, but this must set some sort of record. A Houston mom apparently decided that her 16-year-old was old enough to babysit her other five children, ranging in age from 1 to 15, so she left on a little jaunt — FOR A MONTH TO NIGERIA. What, was she following up on one of those lottery winning emails?

When she left for Nigeria on Dec. 31, [Shanell Monique] Mosley told her 15-year-old daughter she would return in a month, child welfare officials said.

Prosecutor John Jordan said Mosley’s six children, now in foster homes, were starving and her older children couldn’t recall their own birth dates.

Mosley’s children are ages 1, 7, 8, 9, 15 and 16, Jordan said. The other two children found in the home were 3- and 4-year-olds the family cared for on behalf of a single father who worked, Jordan said.

The 9-year-old son told authorities he and the baby ate a still-frozen pizza for breakfast the morning they were discovered home alone. There were no diapers, baby food or formula for the infant, no sheets on beds and fruit was rotting in a basket, Jordan said.

And who was this dad that dropped his kids off at this daycare from hell? He didn’t notice something was a bit off? “Oh, well, got to go to work!”

Mosley was arrested when she returned this past Monday and charged with child endangerment and child abandonment.