Mother, 18, ‘Sorry’ She Abandoned Baby

An 18-year-old woman who admitted that she was frightened and confused by the birth of her baby remained in Orange County Jail on Friday on suspicion of abandoning her 2-day-old boy in a paper bag outside a Tustin apartment complex.

“I’m really sorry I did it,” Lajuna Shanetta Hayes said Friday. “It was a mistake--I got scared.”

Hayes said she moved to Tustin from Florida about two months ago to live with her cousin and got a cashier’s job at a local drugstore. She said she never told her parents in Florida or her cousin that she was pregnant and never saw a doctor before having the baby alone in her cousin’s apartment on Tuesday.

“I would have had help” from relatives in supporting the baby, Hayes said, “but I didn’t know that (at the time). I didn’t know what to do.

“I really want to keep the baby now. It was a big mistake.”

Her baby, Frank, apparently was healthy and uninjured when neighbors found him Thursday evening in the Walnut East apartments. He was bundled in a paper bag with a handwritten note that read: “Whoever finds this take care of this baby please!”

Authorities took the infant to Childrens Hospital of Orange County, where he will stay until a bed opens at Orangewood Children’s Home, the county emergency shelter.

Hayes, being held on $10,000 bail, will be arraigned Monday on charges of felony child endangerment and abandonment. She could receive up to six years in state prison if found guilty, but a jail sentence is not a mandatory penalty, said James P. Marion of the district attorney’s sexual assault and child abuse unit.

“I’ve never been in jail before,” Hayes said. “I’m just really scared. I’m just here right now. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Hayes said she graduated from high school last May and was working at a fast-food restaurant when she left Florida. She had told the baby’s father that she was pregnant, she said, but that he didn’t care .

On Thursday night, she said, she called her parents, who told her that they were not able to come to see her. But they are willing to support her, she said.

Frank Hayes is the third baby abandoned in Orange County in less than three weeks. The others, Joshua Walsh, 1, and an unidentified male infant found in a trash bin, remain in healthy condition at Orangewood, spokesman Bill Steiner said.

Sgt. Paul Ordonez of the Orange Police Department said detectives have no leads on the mother of the unidentified baby, who was found March 13 in a trash bin near the Crystal Cathedral. Steiner said the baby will be adopted if the mother does not come forward.

Joshua’s mother, Danette Walsh, 19, is charged with abandoning her child in some bushes in front of a Garden Grove home, also on March 13. Joshua could be declared a ward of the court at a hearing Tuesday, Steiner said.