Woman convicted of leaving her newborn in an underground garbage bin

A 31-year-old woman was convicted in an Amsterdam courtroom on charges of attempted manslaughter for abandoning her newborn baby girl in an underground dumpster. Todisoa R. was sentenced on Thursday to four years in prison for the crime, which took place over seven years ago. The sentence matched the opinion given by prosecutors two weeks earlier.

The child was found on Sunday, October 26, 2014, at 4:15 a.m. by a passer-by who heard the child's cries from the garbage bin on Fritz Conijnstraat in Amsterdam-Slotermeer. "Because the plastic bag was tightly knotted, the child could have easily suffocated. There was also a good chance that heavy garbage bags could have fallen on the baby, and that it would develop hypothermia," the court said in its ruling. The girl was adopted soon after the incident, and is now 7 years old.

Over the years, the criminal investigation slowed to a crawl, until R. was arrested in Germany for theft in April 2021. Her fingerprints matched trace evidence recovered from the bag in which the baby was found. R. was extradited to the Netherlands the following month.

The woman is originally from Madagascar, and is the mother of six children. Experts evaluated her and determined that she has an intellectual disability. She eventually confessed during questioning, police said, but recanted her story. Prosecutors said her story changed several times in questioning, and that her statements showed clear inconsistencies about what had happened.

The court said that, "the woman also provided information that the court regards as knowledge only the perpetrator would have. For example, she knew that the waste container in which the baby was abandoned is in the vicinity of the Amsterdam Sloterdijk station, and that a pacifier had been left with the baby in the plastic bag."

R. repeatedly blamed the baby’s father, Kaba, for the incident. She claimed that she was raped, leading to the pregnancy, and that the alleged rapist took the baby while the mother was sleeping. He later supposedly told her the baby had died.

"The court does not find this credible," the judges wrote in the verdict.

R. came to the Netherlands as an undocumented migrant in the beginning of 2014. She said she did not report the crime to the police out of fear of deportation.