[div class="story"] [span style="font-weight: bold;" class="headline"]Child support request leads to rape arrest[/span]
[span style="font-weight: bold;" class="subhead"]Mother charged with statutory rape when Family Court realizes father was 13[/span]
[/p] [p style="height: 35px;"] [span style="float: right;"] [/span] [span class="byline"]By DON LEHMAN [a href="mailto:
[email protected]"]
[email protected][/a][/span]
[span class="updated"]Friday, October 06, 2006[/span]
[/p] [div class="body" id="body"] WARRENSBURG A woman's desire to get child support payments from the father of her young child landed her in jail Thursday, police said.
The Warrensburg mother's trips to Warren County Family Court in recent weeks prompted court officials to investigate her claim further, allowing them to determine the person who fathered her child was 13 years old when he had sex with her, officials said.
That's statutory rape under state law, accusations that led to the arrest Thursday of Kimberly A. Baker, 22, of 22 Evergreen Lane, on a second-degree rape charge, according to the Warren County Sheriff's Department.
Baker's arrest came about five weeks after she filed petitions in Warren County Family Court seeking child support for her 2-year-old daughter, Julianna.
She identified the father as a 16-year-old boy whom she told the court she had sex with on two occasions in September 2003, when she was 19-1/2, authorities said.[/p] [!-- advertisement --] [div class="ad-in-story"][!-- AdSys ad not found for news:in-story --][/div] The problem is the boy would have been 13-1/2 at that point, well younger than the state's age of legal consent of 17 for sexual relations. As part of the court proceedings, she gave a sworn affidavit admitting to having sex with the teen, officials said.
"But for her having made the application in Family Court, we never would have known about this," Warren County District Attorney Kate Hogan said. "It was such an unusual way to have a case come forward."
Baker's child was born June 14, 2004. A birth announcement that ran in The Post-Star the next day did not list a father.
The teen's name was not released, and he is being considered a victim in the case.
Hogan said the investigation began after Family Court Judge J. Timothy Breen referred the matter to her office and the Sheriff's Department.[/p] Paulette Kershko, the court attorney for Warren County Family Court, said Breen had no comment on the case. She would not say whether either party in the Family Court case had a lawyer.
Baker was arraigned in Warrensburg Town Court and was sent to Warren County Jail for lack of $10,000 cash bail or $20,000 bail bond.
The arrest was made by sheriff's Investigator Edward Affinito.
Second-degree rape is punishable by up to 7 years in state prison.[/p][a href="vny!://www.poststar.com/articles/2006/10/06/news/doc4525bd1506ad1049837652.txt"]Story Link[/a]
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