COLERAIN TOWNSHIP, Ohio — An Indiana mother who pleaded guilty to abandoning her 5-year-old son on a dark road in Colerain Township learned her sentence Wednesday.
Heather Adkins, 32, was sentenced to 6-months at the River City Correctional Center for mental health rehabilitation, our news partners at WCPO reported. She will not face any prison time.
According to court documents, in February, Adkins drove her son Thomas, who is non-verbal and autistic, approximately 75 miles from their Indiana home to another state where he was taken to an unfamiliar, dark, dead-end street and left alone near a flooded creek, according to WCPO.
>> ‘To save him from me;’ Mother accused of abandoning son in Hamilton County arrested in Kentucky
Colerain police posted on social media the child was found approximately an hour later by passing motorists.
Adkins was arrested days later on an outstanding warrant for an unpaid traffic ticket at a Georgetown, Kentucky gas station almost 100 miles away from where she allegedly left her son, WCPO reported.
The Georgetown Police Department said they weren’t initially aware that Colerain police had filed a warrant for Adkins on child endangerment.
Adkins drove from the family’s home in Shelbyville, Ind. to Tennessee where she dropped off two of her children, according to WCPO.
She arrived at her friend’s house with her 3-year-old and 8-year-old but not Thomas.
“She was like I need you to watch the kids for a couple days,” Adkins’ childhood friend Crystalyn Davis told WCPO.
“She said she had got in a fight with Kevin, which is the kids’ dad, and that he had pretty much kept Thomas from her,” Davis said. “She said, ‘I’m going back up there to get him,’ and then I’ll come back and get the two boys.”
She said her friend was gone within 10 minutes, according to WCPO.
Adkins previously said that she left the child to “save him from herself.”
Later, she said she had to leave him in her car which broke down while she went to a gas station, WCPO reported.
According to WCPO, Adkins admitted to the facts of the case in court earlier this month but denied that she indented to harm her son.