A one-hour-old baby girl was found abandoned outside a trailer park in the US, local authorities have said. Officers were alerted to the child, who still had her umbilical cord and placenta attached, after a couple found her on a hill near Mulberry, a city in Polk County, Florida.
Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said: “She’s got a great set of lungs, so as she was screaming out for help, she saved her own life as well.”
He added: “She’s as beautiful as an angel, it’s by the grace of God she’s not dead, and LNU is ‘last name unknown.”
Sheriff Judd continued: “You can literally walk up, hand that baby to a firefighter, and drive off, and never disclose who you are, and there’s no criminal liability to that.”
Temperatures in the area around Mulberry hovered around the low 50s at the time.
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The child was thought to have been an hour to an hour-and-a-half old when police arrived.
The baby, who Sheriff Judd named “Angel Grace LNU”, was fully developed and weighed 6.5 pounds.
However, Sheriff Judd could not confirm whether the infant was born in the woods or taken to the woods after it was born.
The child was healthy but had some insect bites from being left outdoors.
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Sheriff Judd said the infant’s mother will be held accountable after she “left this child in the woods, ostensibly to die”.
The Sunshine State has safe haven laws in place which provides parents with the opportunity to leave newborns at fire stations or medical facilities up to a week after birth.
Addressing questions about Florida’s safe haven laws, Sheriff Judd said: “There’s no criminal liability for that but you’ve got to know to do it and I would suggest most people do not know there is a safe haven law.
“We have one and we encourage the use of that and every now and then we see that someone takes an infant, less than a week-old, to a fire station or an EMS station or to a hospital.
“But literally they could have handed this infant over into professional hands, had no liability and we would have been way down the road on this.”
