Search continues for infant’s mother

Investigators continued searching on Wednesday for a woman who abandoned a baby in a bathroom stall at a highway rest area.

The baby, which was between three and five pounds, was found dead about 4:15 p.m. Tuesday in a woman’s bathroom at the westbound Interstate 90 rest stop near Sprague, Wash..

Preliminary results of an autopsy performed Wednesday by the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office did not answer if the baby was stillborn or alive at birth, said Lincoln County Sheriff John Coley. The baby was about a month from full-term, said Undersheriff Wade Magers.

Magers called the case “a heinous situation that we’re trying to get to the bottom of.” It was “very, very traumatic for the emergency response people,” he said.

A woman who found the baby told investigators that she saw a woman who might have been the mother leaving the restroom, Magers said. She was described as in her early 20s, tall and thin with blond hair. She was wrapped in a large beach towel that said “Hawaii.”

Magers asked that anyone with information call the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office at (509) 725-3501.

In Washington it is illegal to abandon a baby, unless handed to staff at a hospital or fire station.

Earlier this year, Stacey L. Jones was sentenced to three years in prison after she pleaded guilty to second-degree counts of manslaughter and child abandonment. Jones left three of her newborns in boxes at doorsteps in two separate incidents. In 2001, she left a 2-day-old baby on a neighbor’s porch; in 2003 she abandoned twins, and one of them died.

In 2004, Angela C. Jay pleaded guilty to concealing a birth after her baby was found in a Spokane alley. She told The Spokesman-Review in a 2003 interview that she “didn’t know what to do” after she gave birth while sitting on a toilet and the baby was stillborn.

She was sentenced to 10 days in jail.

In 2000, Spokane resident Julienne Brunette gave birth in a restroom toilet in the Salt Lake City International Airport. She pleaded guilty a year later to attempted obstruction of justice and was sentenced to a year of probation, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. A witness testified that Brunette voluntarily opened the restroom stall door and allowed her to pull the baby from the toilet.

The baby was adopted. Brunette explained to a court that she had panicked.