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SALT LAKE CITY -- Charges have been filed against a woman who allegedly left her 13-month-old baby home alone for days.
According to court documents the mother, Jacqueline Vides, had not been seen for at least two days before her baby was found by the landlord Jose Campos.
Last November, Campos said he walked up to the house near 750 South and 900 West and heard the baby crying inside.
Arturo Rodriguez and his father-in-law were in their store when Campos came in and told them he heard a baby crying next door. They went over and found a 13-month-old boy inside.
Through his wife as an interpreter, Rodriguez said he had not seen the mother in a couple of days. He said the child had no food, no clothing, and hadn't been changed or bathed. The baby was skinny and was wearing only a diaper.
When he walked in, Campos said the house was filthy. "The house was really bad, really dirty, clothes on the floor, a lot of mess on the floor," he said. "It was dirty."
Campos said he picked up the baby off the floor and then called police.
In a probable cause statement, Salt Lake police say they spent more than two hours inside the home. The child's mother never showed.
Instead, when police located the child's mother, she told them she'd dropped her son off at a babysitter's house Nov. 13.
"[She] called the babysitter two days after, which would have been around the 15th, was told her child was given to her boyfriend, and [she] did not make any attempts to contact her child after," said special victims prosecutor Cristina Ortega.
In fact, according to the probable cause statement in the case, Vides never attempted to locate her child -- even after she was arrested on another matter Dec. 11.
This week, prosecutors officially filed charges against her: one count of child abandonment -- a third-degree felony that could carry up to five years in prison.
"This is the first case I've seen where it's been the time frame and the circumstances," Ortega said.
Due to privacy laws, we do not know the current whereabouts of the baby. The prosecutor on the case says the last she was aware, he was in state custody.
Meanwhile, Vides is currently in the Utah State Prison serving time for another case. KSL News looked into her background and found several drug charges, including one felony case.
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Story compiled with contributions from Sarah Dallof, Anne Forester and Marc Giauque.
