A court sentenced a young mother and her brother to at least eight years in jail each Tuesday after they acknowledged putting the woman's 9-month-old son on a four-lane highway outside Moscow in the hopes he would get killed.
The Moscow Regional Court said 24-year-old Yelena Osina and her 21-year-old brother Alexander pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the May 2011 incident on a stretch of Dmitrovskoye Shosse in the Mytishchi district of the Moscow region. A passing motorist rescued the child, unharmed, after about 10 minutes, and the boy has since been adopted.
The motorist earlier told Russian media he thought he saw a kitten or a dog on the road before he stopped. The woman and her brother were watching what was happening near the road, investigators said.
Investigators said the boy had been lying on a poorly lit section and his survival was a miracle.
In previous testimony, Osina said life had become hard with the baby — her parents, who they lived with, complained and her boyfriend had moved out. After the verdict — in which she got eight years in prison and her brother got nine — Osina said on television she thought the sentences were too harsh.
"Everyone can make a mistake," she told Channel One.
(AP, MT)
