Mother who hid baby in filthy car boot jailed in France
TULLE: A French court on Friday sentenced a woman who kept her baby hidden in the maggotinfested boot of her car to two years in jail for negligence causing mental disability.
Rosa Maria Da Cruz, a mother of four originally from Portugal, kept her daughter, Serena, hidden away until she was nearly 2.
Her lawyers said she had never accepted falling pregnant again.
In 2013, a mechanic discovered the infant in the filthy boot of Da Cruz’s car when she took it to be repaired.
Hearing a noise, he opened the trunk to discover the baby in a car seat, naked, filthy and dehydrated. She w a s s u rrounded by maggots and excrement.
The infant was also kept in an unused room at the family home in the Correze region of central France.
After a week-long jury trial, a court here sentenced Da Cruz to a five-year jail term, three years of which were suspended, and ordered that she be monitored by social services for five years and receive psychiatric treatment.
She was jailed on Friday evening in a prison in the central city of Limoges but was given leave to apply for early parole.
The case of the “baby in the boot” caused horror in France.
Serena, who turns 7 next week and is in foster care, suffers from severe mental impairments, including irreversible autism, which medical experts have linked to sensory deprivation during her early months.
Da Cruz’s partner Domingos Sampaio Alves, an unemployed bricklayer, insisted he had no idea his partner had given birth to another child.
During the trial, it emerged that she had initially hidden the pregnancies of two of her other children from her partner, not wanting to face reality.