A mom has been accused of starving her two-month-old son to such an extent that police officers said he looked like “a Holocaust survivor.”
Christin Donat, 26, of Evansville, Indiana, was arrested and charged with two child neglect charges in connection to her baby’s severe malnourishment, Vanderburgh County’s Sheriff Noah Robinson told reporters on Monday.
According to an affidavit seen by The Independent, Department of Child Services worker Michael Smith was summoned to the Deaconess Gateway Hospital on November 6 to a report of a child suffering from “malnutrition, starvation, and dehydration.”
The two-month-old child had been taken from his mother and rushed to the hospital by a friend, according to the affidavit.
The infant was so malnourished that his skin was “hanging off” his arms and he weighed just 6 pounds, 6 ounces – two ounces lighter than he had weighed at birth, the documents state.
“One of the terms used to describe this child’s condition was almost as that of a Holocaust survivor,” Robinson said.
The sheriff described the infant’s condition as similar to emaciated temporal wasting – a condition that causes significant weight loss – with “a sunken-in face, where literally all the fat has been used in the body, trying to keep it alive, resulting in the skin hanging from the bone.”
Donat allegedly arrived at the hospital hours after her child was rushed to emergency care, claiming that she had needed to rest after working a shift at a Dollar General in Evansville.
According to the affidavit, Donat first told investigators she fed her infant one ounce of formula six times a day but later changed her story. She also allegedly failed to feed her son properly while he was in the care of medical professionals at the hospital, forcing staff to intervene.
Donat showed some remorse to investigators saying “she should have done things differently,” the affidavit says.
Robinson said that there was no other conclusion to make than Donat “being deliberately indifferent to the needs of the child.”
The baby has now been taken out of Donat’s custody and placed with a foster family.
Donat is now being held at the Vanderburgh County Jail on a $25,000 bond. She is scheduled to appear in court on Monday.
