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Inset: Christin Donat (Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office). Background: The mobile home where Christin Donat lived with her 2-month-old son (WEVV/YouTube).
An Indiana mother will avoid prison time for nearly starving her 2-month-old baby boy to death, Hoosier State court records show.
In November 2024, Christin Donat, 26, was accused of two counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury. Specifically, she was charged with placing her child “in a situation” endangering his “life or health” and depriving him of “necessary support.”
On Thursday, Donat pleaded guilty to both counts.
A Vanderburgh County court sentenced the defendant to three years for each count – with each sentence was suspended in lieu of probation, the sentencing order shows. The court also entered a no-contact order subject to the discretion of state child welfare authorities.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Donat’s 2-month-old son was taken away by a friend of hers and rushed to the hospital while she rested at home following a work shift at Dollar General.
The baby was suffering from severe malnutrition, dehydration and starvation, Evansville Police Department detectives told Evansville-based CBS affiliate WEVV. The neglected child weighed just 6 pounds, 6 ounces — two ounces less than what he weighed at birth.
“One of the terms used to describe this child’s condition was almost as that of a Holocaust survivor,” Vanderburgh County Sheriff Noah Robinson said, describing the infant as having symptoms similar to emaciated temporal wasting, including “a sunken-in face, where literally all the fat has been used in the body, trying to keep it alive, resulting in the skin hanging from the bone.”
The sheriff said the boy made a full recovery by quickly gaining significant weight after being given the proper care. Robinson said this was an obvious sign to investigators the child had been neglected.
Initially, the neglectful mother claimed she was feeding her son an ounce of formula around six times each day – but that he was spitting up much of it daily as well. She told police she was overwhelmed with work and other things going on in her personal life. But “testing and observation” by hospital workers found Donat’s story did not ring true.
Donat told investigators she addressed her boy’s eating and weight issues with a pediatrician but never took him to a scheduled follow-up appointment, police said. She also never took her child into an emergency room even as his condition deteriorated.
“Her statements to the police and the sheriff’s office afterwards provided a somewhat contradictory description of her level of care and it really left us to no other conclusion than she was being deliberately indifferent to the needs of the child, constituting neglect,” Robinson explained. “The hospital’s own testing could not replicate this child’s inability to digest food, and once the child was being fed properly, the child quickly gained three pounds in a matter of days, so we know that the child was fully capable of digesting the food.”
In time, however, Donat admitted she should have done things differently and knew her child would have died had she not gotten him proper help, law enforcement allege.
The child has been placed with a foster family.