Teen Gets 180 Days in Baby’s Kidnapping

Swiping a newborn baby boy from an Oxnard maternity ward earned a 17-year-old girl a 180-day sentence Tuesday in juvenile custody, where attorneys say she will get the psychological help she needs.

The Oxnard girl, now pregnant by an unidentified father, may be released to a court-supervised guidance program in November and is to give birth to her own baby in January, said her attorney, Deputy Public Defender James Harmon.

“She was actually very remorseful and feels pretty bad, and is still not entirely sure in her mind why she did it,” Harmon said about the May 29 kidnapping at St. John’s Medical Center.

“She is now pregnant, and being in that state, I think it’s sunk in with her quite a bit about just how traumatic that is,” for a family to have its child kidnapped, he said.

The girl had donned a medical smock like a nurse’s uniform, walked into St. John’s neonatal unit and approached family members who were crowded around newborn Ricardo Herrera Jr.

The girl told them that she had to take the boy for just a few minutes to have him photographed, then tried to leave the hospital. But a monitoring device on his wrist tripped an alarm system, and a hospital employee confronted her.

When she told him the baby was hers, he refused to believe her, so she handed over the baby and fled, witnesses said.

She later admitted that she hoped to raise the baby as the child of her boyfriend, but she had not made very serious plans beyond getting the baby out the door of the hospital, prosecutors said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Rhonda Schmidt said she asked Judge Charles McGrath to sentence the girl to a longer term in the California Youth Authority’s Ventura School prison in Camarillo.

“I think she has serious, profound problems that would require a longer time to address than any local facilities would be appropriate for,” Schmidt said Tuesday outside the courtroom. “It was not only the seriousness of the offense that played into it, but also the psychological problems exhibited in her behavior.”

But the girl wrote a letter to McGrath and to little Ricardo Jr.’s parents apologizing for the kidnapping charges. She had pleaded guilty earlier this month.

McGrath sided with Harmon, who argued that the girl had no criminal record and was sorry for the kidnapping.

“She feels lucky that she was caught at the stage she was caught at, and she would have felt worse had there been injuries suffered by the child, or if she’d gotten it home and then neglected it,” Harmon said.

The girl, who was unidentified because she is a juvenile, will be held in Colston Youth Center in Ventura until November, or perhaps longer if she misbehaves. But she is likely to be released in November and then spend the last 60 days of her sentence in a home-supervision program or a less restrictive residential facility during the final months of her pregnancy, he said.

She has served 57 days in Juvenile Hall awaiting her day in court, and she could remain on probation until age 21, he said.