The mother has been interviewed by officials, and won’t be prosecuted after a determination was made that she had “followed the spirit of New York’s ‘Safe Haven’ Law,’” Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Wednesday night.
The law allows a parent to leave a baby with an appropriate person or in an appropriate location, Brown explained.

“It appears that the mother, in this case, felt her newborn child would be found safely in the church and chose to place the baby in the manger because it was the warmest place in the church,” Brown said in a statement.

The custodian who found the infant had been on a break and wasn’t inside the church when the woman left the child there.

But the mother also returned the next morning to make certain the baby had been found, Brown said.

Geraldine Walsh, 50, a school nurse who works at Holy Child Jesus Catholic Academy, was one of the first people who treated the infant after he was discovered later that day.

“At first I thought they were joking,” she recalled, describing how she got a call from the church across the street from her school.

“But when they told me it was a newborn with the umbilical cord, I realized this was serious,” Walsh said.

“I had all these things going through my head. Is the baby blue? Is the baby breathing?”

When she reached the infant, Walsh acted quickly.

“I had to tie the umbilical cord,” she said.

“The mother must’ve just clipped it. There was some blood oozing out of it. There was blood everywhere.”

The store clerk who rang up the woman on Monday said he mistook her for a shoplifter at first — on account of the anxious way she was behaving. “I was watching her on the camera,” the worker said, decling to give his name.

“She entered the store and went to aisle one, then turn left to aisle six, where she picked up the [towel],” he said. “She then went to aisle 8, then to aisle 6 and then 3 before she went to pay. She didn’t pick up anything else so I don’t know why she went to the other aisles,” he said.

The woman appeared to be in her 20s, he said.

The clerk said he couldn’t even tell the woman was holding a child when she entered the store.

“The baby was covered with the jackets and I couldn’t see it,” he said. “The baby never made a sound.”

Additional reporting by Shawn Cohen