A man who admitted leaving an 11-month-old boy alone on the side of a Southland highway after finding him in the car he had just stolen has apologised to the baby's mother.
"I'm sorry for what I done [sic]. I shouldn't have done that. I'm saying I'm really sorry to the child's mother," Charanjit Singh, 31, of no fixed abode, said from the dock in the Invercargill District Court yesterday.
The boy was rescued by a passing truck driver and returned to his mother unharmed not long after he was left on the roadside in the Northern Southland town of Balfour on Monday afternoon.
From the dock, Singh also offered to pay for the damage he caused to the woman's $58,000 Mazda CX9, which he drove across paddocks and crashed down a small bank near Balfour while trying to evade police.
Singh has been in custody since his arrest on Monday and pleaded guilty yesterday to six charges - unlawfully taking the Mazda, theft of the complainant's $750 iPhone, failing to stop for police, abandoning a child, driving when forbidden and reckless driving.