MOTHER WHO ABANDONED BABY REPORTEDLY SMOKED CRACK

BOSTON -- A woman who allegedly abandoned her 2-month-old baby outside the
Museum of Fine Arts had been smoking crack before the incident occurred,
prosecutors said at her arraignment yesterday.

Cassie Somers, 28, a former resident of Boston's Mattapan section who now
lives in Solon, Maine, was ordered held on $250,000 bail on charges of
abandoning a child. Another hearing in the case was scheduled for March 26
in Roxbury District Court.

Somers allegedly left the boy on a patch of dirt near some bushes outside
the Museum of Fine Arts at about 5:30 a.m. Sunday. The temperature was 32
degrees and the baby was clothed only in a T-shirt, sweater and diaper.

Museum security officers happened to be watching through surveillance
cameras as Somers drove up in a gray Mercedes and walked around the grounds
for about 10 minutes inspecting different areas around the museum,
including an empty guard shack, prosecutor Michael Flaherty said.

When she left the child near the bushes, one of the officers recovered it.
Somers, who was hiding behind a light pole about 65 feet away, approached
him and said she had left the baby only long enough to go back to her car
for a cloth she needed to change the diaper.

Police found a homemade crack pipe in a diaper bag in the Mercedes,
Flaherty said. He said Somers told police she had been smoking crack before
she drove to the museum. She also faces drug charges, Flaherty said.

The baby was treated at Children's Hospital and is in the custody of the
state Department of Social Services.

It was the city's second case of an abandoned infant in a week.

On Thursday, city workers in East Boston found a dead newborn baby wrapped
in a comforter and stuffed inside a plastic bag.