Pamela Ferreyra received 13 years and four months after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and felony child abuse in the death of the baby known as Baby Garin.

SALINAS, Calif. — A Monterey County judge sentenced a Watsonville woman to 13 years and four months in state prison on Feb. 18 after prosecutors said she gave birth at home in 1994, dressed her newborn son and left him in a grocery bag along a rural road, where he died.

Pamela Ferreyra, 61, was sentenced after pleading guilty in December to one count of voluntary manslaughter and one count of felony child abuse in the death of the infant later known to investigators as Baby Garin. The case had sat unsolved for decades after the boy’s body was found near Garin Road in Prunedale. Prosecutors said the guilty plea marked the 10th cold-case homicide conviction since the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office created a task force to revisit older killings. The case drew attention because it turned on new DNA testing and because the child had never been reported missing.

The case began on Dec. 3, 1994, when a man searching for bottles and cans near Garin and Lewis roads in the Las Lomas area came across a paper bag by the roadside. Inside was the body of a baby boy. Investigators later said the infant was wearing a disposable diaper, a turquoise sleeping suit, a blue jumper, a white T-shirt, a stocking cap and white socks, and was wrapped in a striped baby blanket. Authorities came to call him Baby Garin, a name tied to the road where he was found. An autopsy found that the child had been born alive outside a hospital and was about two to three days old. Prosecutors said he had not been fed for about 24 hours before his death. The cause of death could not be determined, but investigators treated the case as a homicide from the start.

For years, detectives ran down leads without identifying the baby’s parents. No missing-child report had been filed, a fact that left investigators with little to compare against and no obvious family to question. The case later was reopened through the county’s cold-case work, and evidence was submitted for modern DNA analysis. Investigators said that effort eventually identified Ferreyra as the child’s mother. She was arrested in Watsonville in October 2024 and at first faced a murder charge. At an early court appearance, she pleaded not guilty. By late 2025, however, the case had shifted. District Attorney Jeannine M. Pacioni announced that Ferreyra agreed to plead guilty to reduced charges of voluntary manslaughter and felony child abuse causing great bodily injury. According to prosecutors, Ferreyra told detectives she had hidden the pregnancy from her husband and children and delivered the baby alive in her home.

Investigators said Ferreyra described what happened next in stark terms. Prosecutors said she told detectives that after the baby was born, she dressed him, put him in her car, drove to a remote area near Prunedale and left him there. “She never returned to the location or investigated what happened to” the child, prosecutors said in describing her statement. Authorities have not publicly described any witness who saw the abandonment in 1994, and they have not said exactly how long the infant was left alive after being placed outside. They also have not publicly identified any other person as having known about the birth at the time. Those unknowns remained part of the case even after DNA testing tied Ferreyra to the child and even after she admitted abandoning him.

The public record in the case shows why it remained difficult to solve for so long. The baby’s body was found in an isolated area of Monterey County, outside the ordinary view of neighbors, school staff or hospital workers who might have noticed a missing newborn. Investigators said the child had been born outside a medical setting, which meant there were no hospital records to start from. The pathologist could determine that the baby had been born viable and alive, but not the exact medical cause of death. That left prosecutors to build the case through circumstantial evidence, forensic work and Ferreyra’s own statements. By the time charges were filed, more than 29 years had passed. The reopening of the case also reflected a broader shift in law enforcement practice, with local agencies using newer DNA profiling and genealogy methods to revisit older cases that once had little chance of being solved.

The legal path changed over time. After her October 2024 arrest, Ferreyra was booked on suspicion of murder and made her first court appearance in Salinas, where she entered a not guilty plea. Court proceedings continued into 2025 as prosecutors reviewed the evidence and negotiated a resolution. In December 2025, the district attorney’s office announced that Ferreyra had pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and felony child abuse for the December 1994 death of her infant son. Prosecutors also said she admitted an allegation that she caused great bodily injury during the crimes. Under California law, the offenses are classified as violent felonies and strikes. Judge Pamela L. Butler imposed the agreed sentence on Feb. 18, 2026. With sentencing complete, the criminal case has moved from the question of who left Baby Garin beside the road to the final accounting of punishment in a prosecution built from cold-case evidence and a late confession.

Even with the sentence imposed, the story remains marked by the lonely details of how the child was found and remembered. Officials publicly used the name Baby Garin for years before the boy’s mother was identified. Monterey County Sheriff Tina Nieto said when the arrest was announced that the name was chosen not only for the place where the infant was found but also for what it meant to investigators. “We stand as guardians for our community,” Nieto said, adding that every child deserves protection and someone to seek justice on the child’s behalf. That language captured the way the case was carried inside local law enforcement: as both an unsolved homicide and a long-running obligation to a child who had no family member come forward after his death. The sentence does not answer every question about the child’s final hours, but it closes one of Monterey County’s oldest unresolved infant death cases.

After Ferreyra’s Feb. 18 sentencing, the case now stands at its final court stage. Barring any later appeal or post-conviction filing, the next milestone is her transfer to state prison to serve the 13-year, four-month term ordered in Salinas.