Anne Lewis held 3-day-old Miles in her hospital room Tuesday, looking forward to taking him home to Ashland and his two very excited older sisters.

“It’s just instant love, right from when you hear those first cries,” Lewis said. “You take it with you the rest of your life.”

That’s the ideal.

Lincoln Police on Tuesday identified the 21-year-old woman who five days earlier is believed to have taken a different route, abandoning her 11-hour-old daughter at Saint Elizabeth Regional Medical Center after giving officials a false last name, address and phone number.

Megan J. Skrdlant of 5240 W. Chadderton Circle, a 2004 graduate of Lincoln Southwest High School, was ticketed Tuesday afternoon for misdemeanor child neglect/abandonment. The charge could be a first step in the six-month process of terminating parental rights, should officials pursue that path.

The infant, known Tuesday morning as Baby Girl Herrington after the alias her mother gave while registering at the hospital, has been  placed with foster parents, said Marla Augustine, spokeswoman for Nebraska Health and Human Services.

No other information about the baby girl, who was born at 10:17 p.m. Thursday, was released.

And nobody answered the door Tuesday afternoon at Skrdlant’s northwest Lincoln home.

Last Friday morning, according to the police charges, Skrdlant would have awakened on the crisp white sheets of her reclining single hospital bed, gotten into her street clothes and shuffled from the tiled floor of her room onto the carpeted fourth floor hallway. But instead of turning toward the nursery, where infants in knitted stocking caps lie swaddled in butterfly print blankets, she turned toward the elevator.

She may have had to walk past the open doors of rooms where other mothers caressed their newborns, past wall art of mothers and babies, and past a nurses station.

Hospital video footage captured the mother leaving the labor and delivery unit Friday at 9:17 a.m.

But the mother left the baby in a safe place, said staff nurse Susan Gunter in the Saint Elizabeth neonatal unit.

“She gave this a lot of thought,” Gunter said.  If the mother had chosen to have the child at home, there could have been complications and the baby could have died.

“She didn’t take the baby with her or throw her in a dumpster or leave her in a hot car or abuse her,” she said.

The hospital nursery wing has security, but it’s designed to keep people out rather than patients in, Gunter said.

“Mothers are allowed to visit the cafeteria or go outside for a cigarette,” Gunter said, and a mother leaving on her own wouldn’t have aroused suspicions.

As for the mental state of a woman planning to abandon her newborn, the hospital deals with a lot of nervous mothers, Gunter said.

Reporter Hilary Kindschuh contributed to this report. Reach Mark Andersen at 473-7238 or mandersen@journalstar.com.