A young Henrico County woman will be allowed to recover from years of mental problems at home instead of in prison, a Henrico judge ruled yesterday. Circuit Judge Gary A. Hicks sentenced 19-year-old Ebony Tucker to five years in prison but suspended enough of the sentence so that Tucker, convicted of the attempted abduction of an infant baby last year from a hospital, was able to go free.

A 19-year-old woman traumatized by violent deaths and loss in her family left the Henrico Courthouse this morning a free woman. Ebony Tucker had pleaded no contest to charges that she had attempted to take a newborn infant from Henrico Doctors’ Hospital (Forest) last year. But emotional testimony this morning from treating psychologists and Tucker’s tearful mother showed she may have been acting out in the wake of multiple deaths in her family and her own perception that she had miscarried.