‘Mommy ... left me.’ Miami woman charged after 6-year-old son found wandering street
A keen-eyed Good Samaritan noticed a peculiar sight Wednesday while in Miami — a 6-year-old boy all alone wandering the streets, police say. A swift 911 call to help the lost child ended with officers arresting his mother.
Annie Rivera, 30, is facing a charge of child neglect with no great harm. She was issued a $2,500 bond by Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Mindy Glazer and has been released from jail with the stipulation that she can have no unsupervised contact with her son.
Around 11:10 p.m. Wednesday, Arnett Johnson, the Good Samaritan, phoned Miami police to report the discovery of the 6-year-old near Northwest 17th Street and Seventh Avenue, her arrest report read.
He told Miami Herald news partner CBS News Miami, “Somebody has to love that kid. He was just standing there looking, and I happened to walk by and do the right thing and call the police.”
Officers and the Department of Children and Families rushed to pick up the boy, the report read. Authorities said he told them, “Mommy drop me off and left me.”
Police tried to identify the little boy, but could not. So, they put out a flyer with his picture and asked the community to help them find his parents.
By the next morning, around 10:30 a.m., a Miami-Dade County Schools police officer recognized the boy and knew his mother, Rivera. As authorities looked into her, they found she had a Department of Children and Families case from 2025 involving allegations of “inadequate supervision,” police said.
Rivera was tracked down to a nearby apartment complex, just down the street and less than a mile from where the boy was found, authorities said. Police learned the pair were living with a friend.
Officers said the friend told them before she went to bed Wednesday, about two hours before the boy was discovered, that neither he nor Rivera was home, the report read. She, however, did hear the front door open in the middle of the night and went back to sleep.
When she awoke at 6 a.m. and readied her children for the day, one of them asked where Rivera’s son was. The friend replied she didn’t know and assumed the boy was at his godmother’s house.
Rivera was detained by officers at the apartment about an hour after they learned she was the mother, the report read. Detectives said she told them she was with her son early that night as she finished work.
They both took a Lyft back home and arrived at around 8:30 p.m. Rivera then tucked her son into bed, took a shower and got ready to leave and meet a friend.
She further told detectives, police said, that she got into a Lyft and was dropped off at 11:04 p.m. — six minutes before her son was found wandering the street.
After hanging out with the friend, she then went to another job and returned home between 3 and 4 a.m., the report read. Police said she did not check to see if her son was sleeping when she got in.
It wasn’t until the Department of Children and Families called her at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, nearly 12 hours since the boy was found, that she was aware that her son was lost. Rivera thought the friend she lived with took him to school — the friend told police Rivera never told her to do that, police said.
Detectives wrote that Rivera “took full responsibility and admitted it was her fault.”
During her bond hearing Friday morning, Judge Glazer told a crying Rivera, “Right now, you have got to get it together. There was inadequate supervision, and there is probable cause, and there are services for you, and you are likely to use them.”
Rivera is being represented by a public defender.
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