Mother Arrested For Abandoning Son At Hospital

A mother from West Jordan, Utah, was arrested for leaving her 8-year-old son at a hospital. 

Katy Sherrer was arrested and charged with child abandonment and child abuse after leaving her son with a note saying she didn’t want the boy anymore.

“This kid is rude and ungovernable! I do not want him in my house at all!” the note read. 

Sherrer told KSLTV that she thought she was correctly using Utah’s Safe Haven law when she dropped off her son.

“I thought that it was OK that we could drop them off and it was a Safe Haven place,” she said. “I wasn’t sure about the Safe Haven laws or what it meant. I really did not know any other way to go about it.”

When the boy was abandoned on Feb. 21, he reportedly walked up to the from desk of Jordan Valley Medical Center and handed over a note from his mother.

“The note went on to describe the failings of the child and gave his name,” the charges against Sherrer stated.

“In the note, I told them that he was out of control and that he needed more help than I could provide for him,” Sherrer said, declining to deny the claims against her.

“[The idea] kind of behind that was to get him the help he needed from [the Division of Child and Family Services] and to go from there.”

The mother says she has three other children, all of whom have special needs.

While there are Safe Haven spaces in the state, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said that a parent can’t randomly drop a child off anywhere. Children up to the age of 11 can be dropped off at “crisis nurseries” in the state, but those are only in specific locations, and have other limitations.

“You don’t get to arbitrarily drop children off at certain institutions,” Gill said. “You reach out to that organization, that organization helps process your child, there’s an understanding. Everybody understands what everyone’s role is. Everyone knows what they’re supposed to do. But you don’t simply say, ‘I’ve had enough and I’m going to drop off this child and no one knows who I am.'”

Many readers expressed shock over the story.

“I just can’t understand people.lile this woman,” one MommyPage reader commented on the site’s Facebook page. “The child is the way he is due to her bad parenting, or the is a medical/mental health issue. This lady thought she had it rough and was looking for a pitty party, she had no interest in actually helping him or she would have done research, gotten into the pediatrician, seen specialist, etc. You know be a parent. That poor child deserves so much better. I’d offer my home, but it isn’t a possibility raising 2 special needs children of my own and being disabled.”

“I feel like maybe there would be less dead children if the safe havens applied to them,” another commented. “If a parent knowingly can’t take care of a child (there are many reasons why they might need to just drop the child off… mental disorder, drug addiction, etc) and believes it to be an emergency situation then this should be a thing.” 

Sources: KSLTV, MommyPage/Facebook / Photo credit: Pixabay