Brooklyn baby died the kind of death that could make the toughest cop or
firefighter cry.

A teenager who hid her pregnancy from her ailing mother and kid sister
delivered the infant herself several days ago in a Bedford-Stuyvesant
apartment, police said yesterday.

Then 16-year-old Lisa Small allegedly hurled her child into the small yard
behind her tenement, where the family's snarling, hungry dog was waiting.

Police learned her grisly secret yesterday after a neighbor called 911 and
reported a "newborn being eaten by a dog."

Fire Lt. Dennis Murphy arrived at 590 Bainbridge Ave. and found in the icy,
muddy yard a pit bull/Rottweiler mix gnawing on a corpse so mangled it was
impossible to determine its sex.

"At first, we thought it was a doll," Murphy said. "It was too terrible to
think it was a baby."

Murphy said rescuers used fire tools to subdue the dog while police sprayed
it with Mace to loosen its jaws from the baby's body.

"Unfortunately, the infant was dead already," said Police Capt. Patrick
McAndrews.

The dog, which neighbors said was called Midnight and was kept half-starved,
was taken to a Brooklyn pound.

Small, a sophomore at Thomas Jefferson High School, told detectives at the
73rd Precinct the baby was stillborn. No charges were immediately filed
against the teen, who was being questioned at the stationhouse last night.

Neighbors in her building said she was a quiet girl devoted to caring for
her mother and raising her 6-year-old sister.

"She's not a violent person," said Marie Stanton, 19, a friend of the teen.
"She's a good girl."

Murphy said the case was even more tragic because Small could have dropped
off her unwanted child at any firehouse in the city without fear of
prosecution under the Abandoned Infant Protection Act, which Gov. Pataki
signed into law in July.

"It's very sad, very tragic," Murphy said, "if the baby was, in fact, born
alive."