Woman pleads guilty to abandoning babies

A 38-year-old Spokane woman who abandoned three newborn babies, one of whom died, pleaded guilty Monday to second-degree manslaughter and two counts of second-degree child abandonment.

Stacey Lynn Jones faces a standard range of 21/2 to 31/2 years in prison when Spokane County Superior Court Judge Sam Cozza sentences her on March 11.

Deputy Prosecutor Ed Hay said he hopes to review defense-commissioned psychological evaluations before deciding what sentence to seek. Hay agreed to reduce a first-degree manslaughter charge to second-degree to obtain Jones’ plea.

Jones was charged in October 2003, about 11/2 months after her day-old twin sons were found in a cardboard box outside a home in the 300 block of East Shiloh Hills Drive. One of the infants was dead.

An autopsy showed the death was caused by suffocation or positional asphyxia, a form of suffocation in which body position prevents the victim’s lungs from moving.

The home where the babies were abandoned was within blocks of a home in the 8300 block of North Antietam Drive, where a newborn girl had been found abandoned two years earlier. Police immediately suspected the same woman had abandoned all three look-alike infants, and that she lived nearby.

All of the infants were abandoned in cardboard boxes containing hairs and other evidence that led investigators to suspect a connection. The twins were in a Columbia Lighting box that detectives traced to an assembly line where Jones worked.

Jones lived in an apartment at 40 E. Pineridge Court, near both abandonment sites.

At first, Jones denied being pregnant or abandoning the infants. She confessed when detectives served a search warrant for blood and hair samples.

According to court documents, Jones said she gave birth to a girl on Sept. 22, 2001, and “went for a walk” two days later to leave the child in a box on the porch of a nearby home.

Jones said she was unaware she was pregnant again in 2003 until it was “too late,” according to court records. She told police she bore twin sons in her apartment on Sept. 5, 2003, and placed them in a closet so her older children wouldn’t hear them.

Court records say Jones took her older children to school and, when she returned, one of the infants wasn’t breathing. She said she tried unsuccessfully to revive the baby.

Then, Jones told investigators, she placed both babies in a cardboard box and again “went for a walk.” She left the box on a driveway, in front of a pickup.

Genetic testing later confirmed Jones was the mother of all three abandoned infants. The tests also proved that the same man, not her husband, fathered all the babies.

“I’m pretty confident he didn’t have any idea what was going on,” Hay said.

Indeed, said the man’s attorney, Bevan Maxey, “he had absolutely no idea and is not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing whatsoever. Since this has come forward, he has tried to do his very best to convince the court that he is an appropriate father and is anxious to assume those responsibilities.”

Maxey declined to identify his client, who is single, but said the man is seeking custody of the surviving twin boy in closed Juvenile Court paternity hearings.

“There is an upcoming hearing to determine whether or not the court will place the child with the father, and we are extremely hopeful that that will be the case,” Maxey said.

The boy, now 16 months old, is in foster care. The boy’s older sister was adopted out before the father knew she existed, Maxey said.

Court records show Jones is struggling to retain contact or regain custody of three older children in pending divorce from her husband, Les Jones.

Les Jones has tentative custody of the children, who live with him in Utah. The children, two girls and a boy, range in age from 7 to 15.

Superior Court Judge Michael Price is to determine their custody in a divorce trial scheduled Feb. 7.

Les and Stacey Jones were married in Spokane in December 1985. They separated in March 2000, according the divorce petition she filed in October 2003, 10 days after her confession to police.

Les Jones said in divorce documents that “there were times when she did not come home for days or weeks at a time” when their marriage soured in 2000.

He said he believed she stayed away to keep him from discovering that she was pregnant.