A Forsyth County grand jury this week indicted a woman accused of placing her newborn daughter in a plastic bag and leaving her in the woods in 2019.
Karima Jiwani, 40, was arrested in May after a nearly four-year investigation, the sheriff’s office said. She was indicted on two charges: criminal attempt to commit murder and cruelty to children in the first degree.
Jiwani remained Wednesday in the Forsyth jail, where she is being held without bond.
On June 6, 2019, deputies were called to an isolated stretch of Daves Creek Road after a family nearby heard the baby girl’s cries. As the family was unpacking from a trip just before 10 p.m., two teenage daughters heard the recognizable noise, investigators previously said.
Deputies rescued the child and performed first aid until she could be taken to a hospital, where workers decided to call her India rather than the standard baby Jane Doe. Investigators now believe she was born earlier that day inside a car, Sheriff Ron Freeman said after Jiwani’s arrest.
“This child was tied up in a plastic bag and thrown into woods like a bag of trash. I can’t understand that. I truly wish I could,” Freeman said in May. “The biological parent, I have trouble with the word ‘mother,’ who inexplicably, intentionally, left her newborn infant to die.”
The little girl, now 4 years old, was adopted and is thriving, according to investigators. Freeman said his agency is protective of her privacy.
DNA offered a break in the case, Freeman said. The Othram lab, which has helped solve other recent Georgia cases including a newborn killed in a University of Georgia dorm in 1996, helped deputies find the baby’s parents.
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