Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 10, 1991                   TAG: 9104100545
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By Laurence hammack/ Staff Writer
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LAWYER HAS NEW EVIDENCE IN BABY CASE

But Carolyn Ann Smallwood Snyder, 19, will have to wait until June for her day in court.

A preliminary hearing in Roanoke Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court has been continued until June 24.

Snyder is charged with felony child neglect in the death of an infant boy discovered in December in a dumpster on Mountain Avenue Southwest. The infant, who was named Baby Isaiah by nurses at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, died five days later.

Authorities have said the full-term child probably was born several hours before he was found the morning of Dec. 19 by an out-of-work construction laborer foraging through the dumpster for aluminum cans.

After confessing by telephone from a Kentucky jail, Snyder was arrested in February. But she soon recanted, and Public Defender Ray Leven later obtained medical records showing that a Snyder's Fallopian tubes were removed in a 1988 operation, casting doubt on whether she is the child's mother.

Since then, Leven has found new evidence. Records from a Los Angeles jail where Snyder was held on a prostitution charge until Nov. 30 - less than a month before the child was born - make no mention of her being pregnant, Leven said.

"If she was eight-plus months pregnant, would her medical condition be blank?" Leven asked.

At a brief hearing Tuesday, a judge decided to continue the case over Leven's objection. Prosecutors said they need more time for DNA tests that would show whether Snyder is the mother.

"It's unfair" to drag the case out, Leven said. "It's putting [Snyder] through a legal and emotional wringer." Snyder, a drifter with a record of prostitution convictions, has been free on bond since shortly after she was returned to Roanoke from Louisville, Ky.

Chief Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Betty Jo Anthony says she wants the tests before presenting her evidence, even though Snyder has confessed twice to two different detectives.

Anthony has said the confessions contain details only someone involved in the crime would know.

Anthony suggested in an earlier hearing that if Snyder is not the mother, then she could have still been involved in leaving the child in the dumpster. Under that theory, she could be tried as an accomplice under the same child neglect charge she now faces.

Meanwhile, authorities are considering other suspects in the case. Police still are waiting for DNA results from a suspect who died earlier this year, and Anthony said another woman recently has been asked to submit a blood sample.

"I think you could say that we are following any leads that come to us," Anthony said.