Video footage has emerged showing a woman leaving a toddler in the front of a stranger's house before ringing the doorbell and running away.
The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office released the footage recorded from the doorbell surveillance system as part of their investigation, after receiving a call from a woman at an address in Spring, Texas, of an abandoned child on her front porch.
The clip shows a woman taking the child to the front door, repeatedly ringing the doorbell and knocking on the door, before turning and running back to her car and driving away, leaving the small boy alone on the front porch.
Luckily, the owners of the house were inside at the time and let the boy inside. The child was uninjured and appeared to be in good health. Child Protective Services arrived at the scene and took the child into custody, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.
However, the mother of the child has since come forward to say the whole thing was a "very big misunderstanding" and that the woman in the video was meant drop the child off at her father's house next door, reports KTRK.
According the deputies, the mother is currently in hospital and asked her friend to take the child to her father's house. When the boy didn't arrive, father Willie Simmons assumed that the plans had changed.
It is unclear why the woman in the surveillance video chose to dump the child and run away rather than wait for someone to answer the door. She has since been identified and faces a possible felony charge of child abandonment, reports KSAT-TV.
"What if my neighbor wasn't there? If my neighbor wasn't there, my son would have been roaming up and down the street," Simmons told KTRK. "That was very irresponsible. And I feel the lady who dropped my son off needs to be held accountable.
"I am angry! I am upset!" Simmons told Inside Edition. "Every time I watch the video, I get more and more madder because if that was her child she would have not left him."
Both parents of the child were later called to the Child Protective Services office in Conroe for an emergency meeting with caseworkers in the wake of the incident.
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