A 15-year-old girl was arrested after she allegedly left her newborn baby in a dumpster on New Year’s Eve, Philadelphia police have said.
The baby later died after it was found around 10:30 p.m. local time on Dec. 31, 2018, according to
The Associated Press. A 40-year-old woman approached police officers, telling them her daughter’s friend placed a baby in a dumpster near Kensington.
The woman said she took the baby from the dumpster and reported the incident to police officers, AP reported. The child was taken to Temple University Hospital and was later pronounced dead, ABC6
reported.
The teen, who was not named, was found at home with her mother. Officials believe that’s where the girl gave birth.
Now, homicide detectives are investigating the matter. The teen has been arrested, AP reported.
The teen was hospitalized for “precautionary medical treatment,” said police, reported
NBC Philadelphia.Other details about the incident were not disclosed by officials.
Meanwhile, nine minutes after midnight on New Year’s Day, Philadelphia recorded its first homicide.
Officers from the police force’s 25th District responded to a “hospital case/person with a gun” in the Kensington neighborhood, reported
Philly.com. That’s when they found an unresponsive man who was shot. Officials pronounced him dead two minutes later at 12:09 a.m. ET on Jan. 1.
Anyone with information is urged to call the homicide unit at 215-686-3334 or call 911. A $20,000 reward is being offered information leading to an arrest and conviction in the Jan. 1 homicide.
Philly Murder Rate Rises
Philadelphia saw a sharp increase in the number of murders in 2018 with 353 in total. That’s the worst since more than a decade ago when 391 people were killed in 2007.President Trump in
2017 noted that “the murder rate has been steady—I mean just terribly increasing” in Philadelphia. When 2017 ended, Philadelphia saw more homicides than it had since 2012.
The city had 314 murders as of Dec. 28 of 2017, an increase of about 13 percent over the previous year, according to an
Associated Press report at the time.
Philadelphia Police Captain John Ryan lamented the city’s burgeoning murder rate. “We did have a very violent August. We recorded 41 murders in August and there were 19 murders in August last year,” he told
ABC6 last year.
Some said the city has a severe drug—particularly an opioid—problem.
“Territorial disputes and people that are on drugs. They gotta go out and start robbing people so you have all this violence, violence, violence,” John Appledorn of the Citizens Crime Commission said in the ABC affiliate report.
A small group of people are committing most of the crimes, police said.
“It’s a very small minority committing most of the havoc,” Philadelphia Police Capt. Sekou Kinebrew told the AP.
These groups, he said, “use violence” as a means to accomplish their goals.
“A lot of times, it is the young people pulling the trigger. Many of them will end up feeling cynical and feeling jaded, and feeling hopeless and they harden themselves to this reality,” Scott Charles, trauma outreach coordinator at Temple University Hospital, told
KYW.
“It really is a consequence of young people who have given up on hope, young people who have been exposed to high levels of violence, who have been hardened, where there isn’t the sense of compassion for others.”
