TOSSED BABY STORY HOAX!!!

Taken from MSNBC

NORTH LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Authorities said Friday that the story of a newborn boy who survived being thrown out of a moving car was made up by a depressed woman.

The 8-pound, 2-ounce boy, who was believed to be less than an hour old and whose umbilical cord was still attached when he came into the custody of authorities on Thursday, was in good condition at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale.

Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne said at a news conference Friday afternoon that the boy was “absolutely perfect.” Nurses at the hospital have nicknamed him Johnny after the doctor who first treated him Thursday, he said.

Jenne said the baby was taken to a local sheriff’s office Thursday by a woman who said she saw it being tossed from a moving car, wrapped in plastic. She claimed that a man and a woman were arguing in the car at the time, he said.

In fact, “the situation is not as horrible as we thought,” he said. “The baby was not ever thrown out of the car.”

Bizarre tale fabricated on spur of the moment Jenne said the Good Samaritan, the woman in the car and the baby’s mother were one and the same — Patricia Pokriots, 38, a barmaid for a non-profit fraternal organization.

Pokriots was arrested in 2002 on an aggravated battery charge. The dispensation of the 2002 charge was not immediately known.

Pokriots was undergoing a mental competency hearing, Jenne said, adding that there was no indication that drugs were involved. It was unlikely that she would be charged in this case, he said, because the only law that she appeared to have violated was filing a false police report.

Although requests to adopt Johnny have flooded into the sheriff’s office and to local television stations, Johnny is not available for adoption, Jenne said, adding that “legal steps must be taken for this to happen.”

A hearing must first be held to terminate Pokriots’ parental rights. That is almost certain to happen because Pokriots told investigators she did not want to keep the baby, fearing she could harm him.

Baby father’s unidentified Jenne said Pokriotz gave birth to Johnny in the bathroom of her own mother’s home, where she lives. She refused to identify the father.

Pokriots told investigators that she did not know she was pregnant because of an illness. She said she kept the child’s delivery a secret “because of embarrassment,” Jenne told reporters.

In a panic, she began driving around, hoping to abandon the boy at a firehouse, when she passed a white car. “The mother came across two people arguing and decided to build a story around this,” Jenne said.

On the spot, she decided to turn her son in to authorities and claim that the couple she spotted had tossed him from the car, he said.

Pokriotz presented the baby to a Broward County sheriff’s substation, claiming to have rescued him. She told the story of the quarreling couple, having “decided to lie about what would happen,” Jenne said.

Asked about supporting reports from witnesses, Jenne said those people had simply seen the uninvolved couple in the white sedan, he said.

Florida law would have protected mother Jenne visited Johnny in the hospital and said Pokriots’ initial story had raised troubling questions. “What have we come to as a society and a community?” he asked.

But in this case, that question had a welcome answer, Jenne said: “The one great thing that comes out of this is there is a great love for this child, this Johnny.”

Jenne stressed that the incident need not have happened, noting that Florida had a “safe harbor law” allowing a mother leave her baby at any medical facility or fire station within three days, no questions asked.

“If Patricia had done this, we would not be here today,” he said, but it was not yet clear whether she knew about the law.

-Sunni

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