Tears for abandoned baby as police hunt for mother

A rose will grow in the Hastings garden where a newborn baby was found dead.

It was planted yesterday when people living in the Christian-run property Rangimarie, which means "peace", gathered for a memorial service for the baby they never knew.

It was beyond the house, the fruit trees and the large, overgrown lawn that a person living there found the baby, whom police now call Moses, on Tuesday afternoon.

He was in the property's very back corner - the place now marked by a square patch of earth beneath a grapevine.

Now police are searching for his mother. Police believe the infant is Maori or Pacific Islander but are not certain whether he was born alive.

Three days after the discovery, neighbours are still struggling to understand how someone could be so desperate that they could abandon their baby.

Lynette Black, who lives by the fence where the baby was found, was badly affected.

"I wish they left it at my doorstep," she said. "I would have looked after it."

Another elderly neighbour said she had had nightmares about the baby all week.

Detective Sergeant Luke Shadbolt, of Hastings, described the case, classed as a homicide inquiry, as unusual.

Results from the post mortem examination threw up more questions than answers, he said, but police were now fairly sure the baby had been left in the garden around New Year's Day and was possibly less than two days old.

He said the mother was likely to be a local.

No one living around the house in Heretaunga St East, known as the Christian Community Movement for Christian Renewal, saw anyone walk on to the property.

Police say no one living at the house was involved.

Hawkes Bay paediatrician Russell Wills believed it was a very young mother who left the baby there after having concealed her pregnancy.

She had possibly panicked or acted in a state of postnatal depression. He understood that the baby was two to five days old.

That suggested the mother was possibly depressed when she acted.

The mother did not leave the placenta there and could be very ill, he said.

"We desperately want to get her the message that she needs medical care. We know she did not have the baby with a midwife or a doctor.

"She is at such a high risk with medical complications and depression. We have to find her."

Addie Wainohu, a midwife with Hastings health service Choices, said it was likely the woman was alone and without the support of family or other networks.

- additional reporting NZPA