PITTSBURGH (AP) — A woman who dressed as a nurse and abducted a 3-day-old boy from a Pittsburgh hospital in a handbag was sentenced Tuesday to 2½ to 5 years in prison, followed by 10 years’ probation.
“All I wanted to do was love someone,” Breona Moore told the Allegheny County judge who sentenced her.
County prosecutors charged that Moore, 21, of East McKeesport, told friends for weeks that she was pregnant and had given birth before buying hospital scrubs and pretending to be a nurse at Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC in August 2012.
Moore was able to take the baby by entering the mother’s room and telling her the child needed to be taken for a medical test, authorities said.
Moore was 5-foot-4 and 230 pounds, but relatives doubted the pregnancy and called police when they heard about the kidnapping on the news.
Police found Moore hiding in the closet of a downtown office building a few hours later, holding the baby. The baby wasn’t harmed.
Deputy District Attorney Janet Necessary argued for prison, despite Moore’s somewhat pathetic circumstances.
“This was not an impulse or spur-of-the-moment thing,” Necessary said. “The defendant made a detailed plan.”
Moore told the judge she became depressed after a doctor told her she’d be unable to have children. She apologized for her actions, and to the baby’s mother, who wasn’t in the courtroom.
“I hope I will be as blessed as you some day,” Moore said. “There are no words to say how remorseful I am.”
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