Psychiatric test for local woman (From Penarth Times)

Psychiatric test for local woman

A PENARTH mother is facing jail for abandoning her healthy 12-week-old baby on a stranger's doorstep.

Baby 'Oliver' was found by housewife Sarah Langley in a pram at the bottom of her garden in Newport on Sunday, January 20 last year.

The tot was secure in the pushchair and was left with four spare nappies, two dummies and two bottles of milk.

Now his mother, who cannot be identified, has been warned she is facing a prison term. At Cardiff Crown Court on January 3, Judge John Griffith Williams QC told her that sentencing would be adjourned for psychiatric reports.

But said that she must not think he is considering any sentence other than a custodial one. At the hearing, the woman was smartly dressed in a black suit and grey top.

She spoke only to confirm her name and to admit cruelty to a child.

When asked by the judge if the woman abandoned her child because she did not want his father to have custody, Stephen Thomas, defending replied that there were "many matters" which were troubling her at the time.

He told the court she admitted deliberately abandoning the child but added that it was not carefully calculated or pre-planned.

Mr Thomas said: "The father of the baby, who was estranged from the mother, did not know that he had been abandoned.

"The woman told him and others that the baby was staying with relatives."

The case was adjourned until Friday, January 31, and the woman was granted conditional bail.

Baby Oliver's abandonment sparked a major search early last year.

Gwen police spent £20,000 in additional resources trying to track the parents of the tot, who is now 15-months-old, and in foster care.

They searched birth records locally and nationwide, and involved other UK forces in making appeals to the tot's mother.

They even traced hundreds of local people who had bought a Littlewoods pram identical to the baby's model.

But after a fruitless search the mystery was solved when his mother handed herself in to the police in May.

DNA was taken to prove Oliver was her son.