Woman Sentenced in 30-Year-Old Infant Abandonment Case
A Watsonville woman was sentenced to 13 years in prison for abandoning a baby on a Monterey County road 30 years ago. The sentencing concludes the decades-old cold case. The conviction and sentencing bring a formal resolution to the long-unsolved crime.
- The woman sentenced is Pamela Ferreyra, 61, of Watsonville, who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and felony child abuse. - The infant, referred to as "Baby John Doe," was two to three days old when his partial remains were discovered off Garin Road in Prunedale in December 1994. - An autopsy revealed the baby was born alive outside of a hospital setting and had not been fed for approximately 24 hours before his death. - The case remained unsolved for decades until the Monterey County District Attorney's Office's Cold Case Task Force used DNA analysis in 2024 to identify Ferreyra as the mother. - Ferreyra admitted to investigators that she had concealed her pregnancy from her husband and children, gave birth at home, and left the newborn in the remote Prunedale location. - Her conviction is considered a strike under California's Three Strikes Law. - Ferreyra's guilty plea marks the tenth conviction for a cold-case homicide since the establishment of the county's Cold Case Task Force in 2020.
