Abandoned Baby Found Dead

DeKalb County authorities said Friday they had not yet conducted an autopsy on a newborn baby boy who died after his parents abandoned him in a storm sewer. Deputy Medical Examiner John Henson said the autopsy would be conducted later Friday. A decision on whether to upgrade charges against the teenage parents is awaiting results of the autopsy.
The parents appeared in a DeKalb County courtroom Thursday night. Clad in orange prison jumpsuits, they showed little emotion after learning their son had died.
Sinead A. Harrison, 18, and her boyfriend, 19-year-old Landis Bernard Stewart-Moore, could face additional charges since the infant died. They remain in jail on $50,000 cash-only bond on felony child cruelty charges.
"We didn't know what to do with the kid," Stewart-Moore told reporters as he left the courthouse in handcuffs. Harrison didn't speak.
Harrison apparently gave birth at her boyfriend's home on Grand Pines Drive in south DeKalb near Wesley Chapel Road late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. After the birth, she went to a local hospital. Stewart-Moore hid the baby, police said.
Harrison told staff at DeKalb Medical Center’s Hillandale facility in Lithonia that she had just delivered a baby and the infant was in a trash bin at a gas station on Wesley Chapel Road. A police search at the gas station turned up nothing.
Gagnon said detectives don’t know why the mother told them that her baby was in a trash can since she did not leave him there.
Harrison gave police Stewart-Moore's address. When police interviewed Stewart-Moore, he said his girlfriend had delivered at his house and he admitted he had put the baby in a storm drain, Gagnon said. Stewart-Moore was arrested and jailed. After Harrison was released from the hospital, she was also jailed.