Charge Dropped Against Mother in Hillside Birth : Court: Prosecutors say the woman’s baby wasn’t in as much danger as first believed.

The district attorney’s office dropped a child-endangerment charge Wednesday against a once-homeless woman who gave birth to a girl last month on a cold, remote hillside in Thousand Oaks.

Maria Gabriela Haulica, 36, had faced trial for felony child endangerment after paramedics retrieved the shivering infant from the woman’s campsite on Nov. 19 and hospitalized the girl with a dangerously low body temperature of 91.7 degrees.

But prosecutors decided to seek dismissal of the charge in Superior Court after learning that the baby’s father was present when she was born, that Haulica had covered the infant with a sleeping bag and that the baby was not in as much danger as paramedics first reported.

The baby, named Danna, is living with a foster family while Juvenile Court authorities decide whether to return her to her mother, said Deputy Public Defender Susan Olson, Haulica’s attorney.

Haulica is happy the charge was dropped “because now she can concentrate on getting her life back together and having the baby, instead of fighting criminal charges,” Olson said. “She felt that (the charge) was totally unfounded.”

Olson said Haulica is now living in the Thousand Oaks apartment of Pablo Angel, her boyfriend and father of her child.

It was Angel who called paramedics to the woman’s campsite in the hills near Erbes Road and Thousand Oaks Boulevard about midnight Nov. 18 as she was undergoing labor. But she had waved them off, and gave birth several hours later.

Again, Angel summoned paramedics, who erroneously believed that the baby was having trouble breathing--based in part on their misunderstanding of Angel’s first report on the baby’s condition, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin J. McGee said.

Angel spoke only Spanish, and paramedics may have had trouble understanding him, McGee said.

“The test was, ‘How endangered was this baby’s life?’ The initial report was that the baby was about to die,” McGee said. “At (time of) filing, it was presented to us as extremely dangerous.”

Initially, investigators believed that the baby was left uncovered for some time, was having trouble breathing and would have died within two hours had paramedics not rescued her.

But paramedics later told investigators that the infant’s condition immediately improved when she was taken into their care.

Also, doctors at Westlake Medical Center said afterward that while the baby’s body temperature was abnormally low, they could not predict how long she would have survived had she not been taken to the hospital.

“When we went through it and talked to the people involved, there were misunderstandings of what occurred,” McGee said. He added that Haulica’s case will be handled more appropriately in child dependency court than in criminal court.

Prosecutors also included Haulica’s mental health--she was reported in 1988 to be suffering from delusions--among reasons for dropping the case. But McGee said her mental state mattered less than the fact that the baby was in less danger than authorities first believed.

Olson said Haulica, a native of Romania who speaks English well, never appeared to have delusions or any symptoms of mental illness.