A Russian woman is facing 10 years in prison after she locked her baby in her home and went to hang out with her friends.
She waited for her husband to leave for military service and then, on Sept. 5, she locked the child, Egor, in the house and went to see her friends. She stayed at a student dormitory.
She told the dorm staff her baby was with a relative.
“I work in the dorm, and she is studying in the 16th grade, and for the last week she was pestering the first year male students. I was chasing her away, telling her ‘You have a child.’ She said that it was okay, since she had an aunt or a grandma at home with the child,” Ludmilla Maximova, a dorm worker, told NTV.
After a week, neighbors were getting suspicious something was amiss when they hadn’t seen the young mother and the child for a while. On Sept. 13, they called police.
Police found the boy dead in the house, showing signs of exhaustion.
Kuznetsova told police the child was unwanted and a burden on her.
She put her son in an orphanage when he was a month old, but the baby was returned to her six months later.
Ludmilla Dyachkova, a neighbor of Kuznetsova, was distraught by the child’s death and by the mother’s behavior.
“She needs to be shot. It’s just, I don’t know, I almost lost my mind,” she said. “I thought he [the boy] would wake up. Where were the parents? The parents are like this [makes a gesture meaning crazy].”
Rostov is a town in the Yaroslavl region some 120 miles northeast of Moscow.
