A Houston woman has been sentenced to four years in prison for abandoning her newborn girl on a sidewalk at her apartment complex.
State District Judge Katherine Cabaniss Parsley sentenced Sidney Woytasczyk on Wednesday after the 22-year-old woman pleaded guilty to one count of abandoning a child under 15.
A neighbor, Albert Peterson, discovered the baby girl as he was leaving for work around 5 a.m. Aug. 10. As he walked to his car, he heard a sound that at first he thought was a cat crying, according to court documents.
But when he got closer, he saw a naked infant on the ground, with her umbilical cord still attached and ants crawling on her.
"I said, 'Oh, man, there is a baby right here,'" Peterson told KTRK-TV. "The baby was brand new."
He and his wife notified authorities after taking the baby inside and wiping the ants off of her.
Harris County sheriff's deputies followed a trail of blood from where the baby was found to a nearby apartment where Woytasczyk lived.
According to court documents, Woytascyzk told deputies that she had had intense back pain the previous night and was unable to sleep because she felt like she needed to go to the bathroom. Around midnight, she said, she was in the kitchen and realized she was giving birth.
Woytascyzk said that she didn't know what to do, so she went outside and put the newborn girl on the sidewalk and then went to sleep.
The infant was turned over to Child Protective Services.
"Had this neighbor not been here, we'd be looking at a homicide," Harris County sheriff's Deputy Thomas Gilliland said at the time. "It's a miracle the child was found."
