Baby India’s mother pleads guilty, gets 15 years in prison for abandoning child

Jiwani entered a negotiated guilty plea last week to one count of attempted murder and first-degree cruelty to children. Her full sentence is for 30 years, half of which is to be served on probation.

“I cannot find the words to describe how someone who should have done their best for a newborn child, instead did their worst,” Forsyth County Sheriff Ron Freeman said in a statement Friday. “I am so proud of our FCSO team for their dedication and never giving up on Baby India. Kudos to District Attorney Penny Penn and her team for bringing this case to a positive resolution.”

The office of E. Logan Butler, one of Jiwani’s attorneys, said the team had no comment Friday.

The family who found the baby the night of June 6, 2019, had just returned home from a trip and were unloading their bags when their two teenage daughters heard the girl’s cries in the woods. Immediately, they called 911.

When deputies arrived, they cut her out of the plastic shopping bag, her umbilical cord still attached.

“Look at you, sweetheart. Aw, I’m so sorry,” Deputy Sheriff Terry Roper is heard saying on body camera video of the rescue as he pulled her from the bag and wrapped her in a uniform jacket.

“Oh, look at how precious you are!” he exclaimed.

The teenage girls' father, Alan Ragetz, later told Channel 2 Action News that he initially thought it was a wild animal wailing in the woods and wasn’t going to check it out. But his daughters were persistent, and he accompanied them when they got their flashlights.

He said the sound was coming from a pile of leaves.

“We went down, pulled it up, there was a poor little baby wrapped in a plastic bag,” he told the news station at the time. “She was alive. She was crying, so we figured that was a good sign.”

Baby India was adopted soon after, and an update on the now-5-year-old girl’s circumstances have not been provided. Investigators have said they want to protect her privacy.