KELLY DAVIES
Staff Writer
It’s been more than two weeks since 21-year-old University of Southern California student Holly Ashcraft allegedly abandoned her newborn baby behind a restaurant near campus. But the story still haunts me.
I constantly check the Internet, the local television news, anything to tell me a little more about this tragedy that seems at once so distant and yet so close to home. But what I’m really trying to find out, what I’ll never get from a newspaper, that is why she did it.
Prosecutors allege Ashcraft, a third-year architecture student from Montana, left the baby in a dumpster behind The Two-Nine, a downtown bar-restaurant on Hoover Street, in the late evening Oct. 10. She then returned to her one bedroom apartment across the street, where she lived alone, until a tip led to her arrest. She now is being held on $2 million bail on charges for murdering her newborn son.
And Ashcraft might have done this before: She was investigated in early 2004 when she checked into a hospital downtown after giving birth, but without a baby. She told investigators the child was stillborn and she disposed of the body on her own.
Now this college-aged woman faces a lifetime behind bars because she made a horrible decision. But she could have made different one, and another question is — why didn’t she know about it?
The Safely Surrendered Baby Law, effective in California since 2002, allows for an unwanted child to be dropped off at a medical building, fire station or other designated area within 72 hours of birth — no questions asked. There is a fire station not two minutes away on Jefferson Street, within easy walking distance. What was going through her mind?
I can’t begin to imagine. I’m trying not to make judgments. But I’m angry. My first thought is this girl had nine months of premeditation, nine months to think about what she was going to do when the baby came, and I don’t want to hear that she was scared or didn’t know what to do.
Many women go through this and they make more responsible decisions, like adoption. But as she demonstrated in 2004 she might have known exactly what she was going to do. She may have left a human being with no option. Then she had others.
It’s hard to talk about her in that way because it sounds so cruel, distant and black-and-white. It breaks my heart when I think about how similar she is to most of us. She even had a Facebook account, filled with her favorite quotes, movies and music. We might have bumped into each other at a football game.
But that’s the way I have to look at it. I can’t know what was going through her head, why she lived alone in such a big city, why she felt so alone, what drove her to kill her newborn child.
I can only hope that if there is anything good to come out of this horrible situation (and I do believe that hope springs from even the most terrible of things), that women in her situation might see her smiling picture on television and turned around, giving themselves and their child the future Ashcraft can’t have.
11-03-2005
