'I didn't know I put baby in the trash'
A mom from Mexico who was arrested after leaving her newborn boy in a bathroom trash can at a city hospital swears she didn’t know she was pregnant — and hadn’t realized she had thrown her baby away.
“I thought it was just blood,” Lucia Garcia, 21, told The Post in Spanish from her Staten Island home on Saturday.
“I didn’t know I put my baby in the trash until the nurse told me later.”
Garcia was arrested May 20, when she was found covered in blood at Staten Island University Hospital.
A police officer working security and cleaning staff heard the baby’s cries and found the newborn boy in the garbage can.
“I was in handcuffs in my bed at the hospital,” Garcia said, adding there was a police officer sitting in a chair in the corner of her room.
She was charged with two counts of assault, two counts of reckless endangerment and one count of acting in a manner injurious to a child, online records show.
In custody
The baby, who was immediately taken to NYU Langone following his birth, is still hospitalized but is in the custody of the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, a source said.
An order of protection was also issued against Garcia at a bedside arraignment on Monday, the records show. Her next court date is set for June 16.
Her father, Ambrosio Garcia, 41, said his daughter had insisted she wasn’t pregnant, and that he brought her to the hospital the night before because she wasn’t feeling well.
Lucia Garcia, who is originally from Mexico and immigrated to the United States about 10 months ago, said she has no idea where her infant son is now.
“I don’t know when I’m going to get him back,” she said.
“I want him back. I want to take care of him. I just want my baby back.”
Garcia said the baby’s dad lives in Manhattan and he came to the room she shares with her father in Staten Island a few times after the two met on Facebook.
The police took her phone at the hospital, so she hasn’t been able to tell him that she had his child.
“How am I going to tell him when I don’t have any way to contact him?” she asked.
But her father plans to find the baby’s dad, she said.
“He is going to have to pay for all of this,” she said of the young man.
Garcia said she wasn’t sure about caring for a baby at first but has since changed her mind.
“At first, I didn’t know if I was ready to be a mom,” she said.
“I thought I had made an error — but now I just want him here with me.”