Newborn Found Alive After Five Days in a Quakers Hill Storm Drain

In Quakers Hill, western Sydney, cyclists on a path beside the M7 motorway heard what they first took for a cat. David Otte and his daughter Hayley stopped at a metal grate. The sound was a baby crying from more than two metres underground.

On 23 November 2014 they and others, including police, lifted a heavy concrete lid. Inside an 8-foot (about 2.4–2.5 metre) dry stormwater pit lay a newborn boy, wrapped in a hospital-style blanket. Police said he had been born about 18 November and pushed through a narrow opening the next day. He had survived about five days without food or water in heat and darkness.

He was taken to The Children’s Hospital at Westmead. Doctors treated severe dehydration and malnutrition. He was listed as serious but stable. Some reports later mentioned bleeding on the brain. NSW Family and Community Services took him into care; a foster family was arranged.

Police identified the mother the same afternoon. She was charged with attempted murder; that count was later withdrawn. In 2016 she pleaded guilty to abandoning a child under seven in danger of death and recklessly causing grievous bodily harm, and was sentenced to a maximum of three and a half years with a non-parole period of one year and nine months.

Rescuers said they were simply in the right place. Doctors noted that newborns can survive several days without feeding, but the drop and exposure still left him at high risk.

Source: NSW Police and court reporting, November 2014–July 2016; BBC News, Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph coverage of the Quakers Hill drain rescue and subsequent prosecution.