"Baby John" RANGEL - Abandoned - Dalton (W of Chattahoochee Forest) GA

The mother of a baby found abandoned in the cab of a broken-down dump truck in the upper Dawnville Road area has been arrested for abandonment in the Sept. 21 incident.


Melissa Rangel, 17, of 110 Northwood Circle, a neighborhood north of Dalton near Cleveland Highway, was charged on Tuesday by the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office with cruelty to a child in the first degree, a felony, two counts of reckless conduct and contributing to the deprivation of a child without causing injury or death.

A “Mr. Rangel” found the baby “wrapped in a towel lying in the floor of a dump truck parked in a carport behind his house,” according to an incident report. Lt. Nancy Chadwick identified the male as Boni Rangel, the brother of Melissa Rangel. The baby boy was taken to Hamilton Medical Center and spent a few days there but has since been released and is “well and healthy,” said District Attorney Kermit McManus.

He was asked the process for filing charges.

“We evaluated the facts (and) met with the investigator,” McManus said. “Obviously this has taken awhile — almost two weeks —- for us to come to these decisions. This has been an unusual case. As a matter of fact, we’ve looked at appellate cases to give us guidance for interpretation of the statutes. We’ve not seen another case similar to this. It appears, for the most part, in the cases we’ve seen where this type of circumstance occurs where the child is born outside the hospital and nobody knows about it, the child generally dies. There is a special statute for that, for reckless abandonment of a child if the child dies.”

He said there was “no similar direct statute ... where the child lives.”

“So this is a little bit different, but the conduct of the girl was violative of these statutes,” said McManus, who added that Rangel is a “good student” who makes As and Bs and is on a college prep track. “But we believe they are the appropriate charges and we’ll go forward from here.”

The result of a custody hearing in Juvenile Court last week was that a decision was made to place the baby with older family members, he said.

“I was not at the hearing,” McManus said. “Before then, the baby was in custody of DFACS (the Department of Family and Children Services).”

A Whitfield County Jail spokeswoman said Melissa Rangel had a preset bond of $5,000 and bonded out of jail later on Tuesday. Rangel answered the door at her home on Wednesday afternoon and was asked by a reporter if she wanted to tell her side of the story. She replied she did, but was on the way to the college and didn’t have time to talk. Later in the day a male answered a number she had supplied and hung up the phone.