An 11-month-old baby girl was found alone and lifeless in the cold, damp tunnel of a power plant on Sunday, just hours after her mother – too drunk to remember how – broke in with the baby.
“I’m so drunk, don’t play with me right now (dead laughing),” Persia Nelson, 24, wrote on Facebook after a drunken night at a friend’s house near the General Electric factory in the state of New York, according to the “New York Post”.
Late Saturday night, in the middle of a winter storm, law enforcement was called to the Schenectady Power Plant, where the intoxicated young mother had just been caught on the premises without permission.
It was then that the headless woman, who had no idea how she ended up on the scene, revealed that she was looking for her baby, little Halo Branton, aged 11 months, the authorities to “The Times Union”.
According to images circulating on social networks, the mother and baby were at a party near the power plant just before the events, said the “NY Post”.
The authorities would have put everything in motion to try to find the baby in a nocturnal search operation which lasted 12 hours, but it was only in the early morning that the baby would have been found alone and lifeless, after having succumbed to hypothermia in a cold, damp tunnel at the power plant.
During this time, his mother was “in a heated building,” Schenectady County Prosecutor Robert Carney said during a press conference Monday.
Given the young mother’s “depraved indifference” to the baby’s death, prosecutors pulled out all the stops by filing both murder and manslaughter charges against the woman who is still in custody.
According to a relative of the child’s father, the latter took steps to obtain custody of the baby at the time of the events.
“He is grieving, my family is grieving. She was beautiful, charming and very intelligent. She looked like her father,” she said, according to the “NY Post.”
