EVERETT — Prosecutors have charged an 18-year-old woman with abandoning her newborn son last year. The infant was found in a dumpster outside an Everett apartment building.
A maintenance worker heard the baby’s cries March 25 and crawled inside the dumpster. She moved several bags of trash and a microwave oven, revealing one of the infant’s feet, according to court documents.
An Everett police officer then crawled into the bin and found the baby lying against some garbage bags and debris. The umbilical cord and placenta were still attached.
The boy was taken to a local hospital. He was a few hours old. The infant was suffering from slight hypothermia, but otherwise healthy, court papers said.
Prosecutors last week charged the boy’s mother, Samantha Houston, with second-degree abandonment of a dependent person, a felony. Houston is accused of creating “an imminent and substantial risk that the child … would die or suffer great bodily harm.”
In Washington, mothers can leave their newborns — no questions asked — with a staff member or volunteer at any fire station, rural clinic or hospital emergency room.
Houston is expected to answer to the charge next month. She faces up to a year in jail if she’s convicted.
It took investigators about a month to identify Houston. They received an anonymous tip from someone that Houston might have been the baby’s mother. Detectives learned that a pregnant Houston dropped out of Cascade High School, returned to classes, no longer pregnant, but refused to talk about what happened.
Houston initially denied being the baby’s mother but reportedly changed her story after detectives collected her DNA.
The teen allegedly told police that she gave birth in the shower but panicked. She “wrapped the baby up in a towel, walked clear across the apartment complex, and put the baby in the dumpster. Then she walked across the street to 7-Eleven to get something to eat,” Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Laura Twitchell wrote in the charging papers.
Houston’s mother later told detectives that her daughter had taken out some garbage shortly before the boy was found. She said she was unaware that her daughter had been pregnant.
The baby was placed in protective custody. There is a dependency case involving Houston and the child. Those records are not public.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com.
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