Milenino, (Russia), 02 August : : A newborn girl has been found covered in insect bites and suffering from severe sunburn after being abandoned on an ant hill by her mother, who now faces an attempted murder charge.
Nadezhda Sorokina, 32, left her day-old daughter in Milenino on July 23 before a passerby discovered the screaming infant. Nikolai Pakhomov, 25, found the newborn covered in ant bites and initially thought the cries were from kittens.
“I automatically dialed 112 and called the paramedics. I took off my T-shirt, wrapped the baby in it, and carried her to the ambulance,” Pakhomov told local media.
Medics found the newborn otherwise healthy, aside from the insect bites and sunburn. A priest named the baby Maria Nikolaevna in honor of her rescuer. Maria is now in the custody of child services, and a couple is already waiting to adopt her, according to local reports.
Police tracked down Sorokina, who has confessed to abandoning the baby. The single mother of three said she gave birth on July 22 and felt she could not afford to care for a fourth child.
A neighbor, Veronika Dokukina, suggested Sorokina’s decision may have been influenced by a breakup with the baby’s father. “I have a small child myself, a one-year-old. I was giving her baby clothes, and she said, ‘I don’t need them anymore.’ I asked, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘He stressed me out, I got so nervous that I had a miscarriage.’ It seems she didn’t have a miscarriage at all; she hid it. It means she planned it in advance,” Dokukina explained.
Sorokina’s ex-husband, the father of her other children, claimed he was unaware of her actions. He stated, “She was never an exemplary mother, but I could never have imagined this.”
