Judge to decide if woman who abandoned newborn gets baby back

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Nunu Sung

Updated: January 13, 2012 6:46PM

A refugee who left her newborn son naked under bushes near her Wheaton apartment should lose her parental rights because she showed “extreme cruelty” in abandoning the baby, DuPage County prosecutors argued Friday.

A judge is expected to rule next week whether 27-year-old Nunu Sung can retain her rights to the now 2-1/2-year-old boy she abandoned immediately after delivering him on June 12, 2009.

Prosecutors, along with attorneys for the boy and his foster parents, all insisted during closing arguments in the unusual case that Sung — a refugee from Myanmar now in prison — isn’t fit to parent the child because of the way she abandoned him.

“For every minute that newborn baby was in Ms. Sung’s control, he was in jeopardy,” Assistant State’s Attorney Augusta Clarke said.

The baby’s court-appointed guardian filed a petition last year seeking to sever Sung’s parental rights, arguing she has no legal claim to an infant she endangered by secretly delivering outside her apartment and then abandoning.

After his traumatic birth, the baby spent at least 1-1/2 hours lying on the ground in 50-degree temperatures before being discovered by a neighbor and his dog.

Sung, who pleaded guilty to lying to police investigating the case, ultimately wants to regain custody of the boy, her attorneys have said. She is scheduled to be paroled later this month after serving about half of her three-year prison term.

Her attorneys said Sung hid her pregnancy and secretly delivered the baby by herself because in her homeland unwed mothers are shunned.

Sung testified earlier in the hearing that she “always” planned to retrieve the baby after cleaning herself up and alerting relatives with whom she was staying that she had given birth.

Sung didn’t immediately return for the baby because she was confused and weakened by blood loss from the traumatic birth, said her attorney, Terra Costa Howard. Sung required a blood transfusion while hospitalized after the birth.

“Nunu Sung was in the middle of a medical crisis. She did not know what was happening,” Howard argued, noting that despite her condition Sung repeatedly told police and state child care investigators within hours of the delivery that she wanted the baby.