In a one-on-one interview with NY1, the woman charged in a plot to abandon her six-month-old niece said she and her boyfriend thought they were doing the right thing when they dropped the baby girl off at a Queens firehouse last week.

"I love her like she was my child and I did not want to do it, but I had no other option,” said Maria Siavichay, through a translator.

Siavichay and her boyfriend, cab driver Klever Sailema, face criminal charges for falsely claiming that the baby had been abandoned in Sailema's livery cab by a stranger.

Police say Siavichay's 27-year-old brother Carlos Rodas is the baby's father and that the mother is a 14-year-old minor.

During a news conference earlier Monday, a visibly-nervous Siavichay, who says she is very poor and arrived in New York just five months ago from Ecuador, called on Rodas to turn himself in. Her brother has been on the run since last week.

Siavichay says the teenaged mother left the baby with Rodas, who said he couldn't take care of her either.

So last week the Bronx family decided to drop the baby off at a Queens fire house. Siavichay asked her boyfriend for help, and he told firefighters a passenger left the baby in his livery cab and ran off. He admits that was a lie.

"Only thing I can tell you is that I am feeling very bad," said Sailema.

Sailema's lawyer says the trio thought they were following the state's Safe Haven law, which allows babies to be legally left at police stations, firehouses or hospitals. But the law only applies to newborns five days old or younger.

Although Salem speaks some English, he said he was more comfortable speaking in Spanish.

"I feel bad because people are talking bad about me,” he said through a translator. “But inside me I feel good because what I did was to help and do a good thing for someone else."

"What is going to happen when she grows up, and we won't see here walking and talking for the first time? We feel bad because we didn't know what was going to happen to the baby," said Siavichay.

The couple is aware that Rodas could face charges for having sex with a minor.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers Fernando Mateo has made a plea on behalf of Sailema, asking that the charges against him be dropped.

"What they did was heroic. If they didn't do what they did, this child could have been in the woods dead, in a dumpster or drowned. God knows what would have happened to this child," said Mateo.

The Queens district attorney says he's taking all the facts into consideration.

The baby and her 14-year-old mother are currently in the care of the Administration for Child Services.

ACS says, under the state's so-called Save Haven law adopted in 2001, parents who cannot care for a baby under five days old can anonymously and legally take the baby to a police precinct, fire house or emergency room. But parents who need help with older babies and children are advised to call 311.

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