The body of an infant was found inside a recycling bin on Friday morning, Saskatoon police said.
Police said officers were called to the 400 block of 5th Avenue North by someone who came across something “suspicious” just before 9 a.m.
Officers located the infant in a recycling bin in the alley.
Police said there is evidence of recent birth, but believe it happened at another location.
Investigators are working with the coroner’s office to determine a cause of death and an autopsy is scheduled for Nov. 12.
“This is going to be a process and one of the steps (investigators) would take, almost immediately, would be to contact health facilities,” said Saskatoon police spokesperson Alyson Edwards.
“We would hope that they would be contacting us if they had come across a mom who had recently given birth and didn’t have a baby with her but certainly that’s something we’ll be following up.”
The immediate concern, police said, is to locate the mother who may be in a vulnerable physical and emotional state.
“I’m going to remain hopeful that we are able to locate her. I think that we certainly … we have a very diligent dedicated police service and our investigators will work incredibly hard on this to try and identify and locate this woman. So I’m going to remain positive about that,” Edwards said.
“I would suggest to her, I would stress to her, that we are here to provide her support, this likely is an emotional and very physically taxing time for her. She’s obviously in a great deal of distress and the first thing that we want to do is assist her in any way we can and hopefully learn more about the circumstances around this baby’s birth.”
Police said their priority is to assist in providing the supports the woman may need.
“We want this mother to come forward. We want to assist her in any way we can, that’s the priority. The investigation will be ongoing but right now we want to provide her with some supports,” Edwards said.
“Our priority is to help get this woman medical attention if she requires it and she likely will. We also want to connect her with supports in the community to be able to provide her some emotional support and then we’ll go from there.”
“We’ve been in situations in this city before, unfortunately … it’s too early to say what the outcome would be but at this point, our priority is to provide support.”
Anyone with information is asked to contact Saskatoon police at 306-975-8300 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
-With files from Thomas Piller
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