NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- A 30-year-old Queens woman was arrested Wednesday and charged with abandoning a newborn baby girl on subway stairs at Penn Station this week.
Assa Diawara was arrested in Queens around 3 a.m. after investigators tracked her trail via surveillance cameras, police said.
She was processed at the 25th Precinct station, where child services cases are handled. She was awaiting a court appearance on charges of child abandonment and endangering the welfare of a child.
The arrest came hours after police released surveillance images of the woman who they believed had left the baby on a staircase near the 1/2/3 platforms at West 34th Street and Seventh Avenue around 9 a.m. Monday.
Images provided by police show a woman holding what appears to be a bundle of blankets around the time the child was placed at the stairwell.
The baby girl was found unattended and wrapped in a blanket, her umbilical cord still attached, according to police. She was taken to a hospital for evaluation and in stable condition.
“I’m calling it the ’Miracle on 34th Street,'" Demetrius Crichlow, president of New York City Transit, told reporters on Monday, alluding to the classic Christmas movie.
New York has a law, enacted in 2000, that allows a parent to relinquish a newborn up to 30 days old at a hospital, or a staffed police or fire station without fear of being prosecuted. Under the state's Safe Haven law, the parent must promptly notify an appropriate person of the infant’s location.
It was not immediately clear if the woman in custody had a lawyer who could respond to the allegations. A phone number listed for her home was out of service Wednesday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.