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A Foster Mother Pleads Guilty To Discarding Girl's Corpse

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SABRINA TAVERNISE

A Queens foster mother accused of discarding the body of her disabled foster daughter in a trash bag left on a Manhattan sidewalk pleaded guilty yesterday to charges of improperly disposing of the girl's body and of falsely reporting that she had been missing.

The woman, Renee Johnson, agreed to a plea bargain before Justice Charles Solomon of State Supreme Court, said a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney's office, Barbara Thompson. In exchange, Justice Solomon said Ms. Johnson would receive 60 days in jail on the two charges, both misdemeanors, out of a maximum possible sentence of a year, Ms. Thompson said.

Ms. Johnson, 51, has already served 37 days, said a spokesman for the city's Department of Correction. She was arrested in July 2003, after the body of the 8-year-old girl, Stephanie Ramos, was found, and was released on bail in August, 2003. A month later, the Queens district attorney said that Ms. Johnson would not be charged criminally in the girl's death, because the girl, who was blind, diabetic and retarded, died of natural causes.

The agreement concludes the final chapter in the grim story of Stephanie Ramos, who was cared for over her eight years in a string of foster homes, Ms. Johnson's being the final one. She was found, several days after her birth, wrapped in a plastic bag and discarded on a New York City subway. The lack of oxygen in the bag probably contributed to her profound retardation, health care officials have said. She was not able to walk by herself, ate through a feeding tube, weighed only 28 pounds and had the mental awareness of a child younger than 1.

Ms. Johnson first reported the girl was missing from the Variety/Cody Gifford House for Children With Special Needs, on East 91st Street, where she claimed to have dropped her off earlier with other children. She later told the police that she had panicked when the girl died, and had put her body in a trash bag.

Correction: November 16, 2004, Tuesday An article on Thursday about a guilty plea by a Queens woman, Renee Johnson, to a charge of improperly disposing of her foster daughter's body after she died of natural causes misidentified the State Supreme Court judge who accepted the plea. He was Justice Michael J. Obus, not Justice Charles Solomon.

2004 Nov 11