A 27-year-old woman who abandoned her hours-old newborn baby in the backyard of a Rosenheim hotel on a cool morning in March has been imprisoned for three years and five months. This is the verdict handed down by the 7th Criminal Chamber of the Traunstein Regional Court on Monday afternoon. The public prosecutor had asked for five years and three months in prison, while the public defender had asked for a maximum of two years probation. He announced in the courtroom that he would appeal the verdict.
The girl that the defendant had given birth to the night before, all alone in her cold and trash-filled apartment, was found on that windy spring morning by a woman who had just left the hotel and wanted to put her luggage in the car. She had heard a sound coming from a dark cloth bag and discovered the newborn inside, wrapped in a white christening gown and a light scarf. If the child had lain in its bag on the cold stone floor for just a little while longer, an expert, the public prosecutor and the judge are convinced that it probably would not have survived.
The child now lives with his father, the defendant’s partner at the time. The defendant kept her pregnancy a secret from him and everyone else. She also didn’t want to reveal her father’s name to the police for a long time.
A few days after the crime, the officers tracked down the woman, who had grown up under extremely difficult conditions as a child, using video recordings from surveillance cameras, among other things. Through a statement from her defense attorney, she confessed to the crime in court. The case horrified people in the region – also because three months earlier an infant who had apparently died violently had been found in a parking lot near Ruhpolding in the Traunstein district. The police investigation in the case has so far been fruitless.
In response to both cases, there is now a baby hatch at the clinic in Traunstein, and one is expected to go into operation soon in Rosenheim. The defendant had searched in vain for such a baby hatch on the Internet.