A 24-year-old mother, who entered a program for first-time criminal offenders today, afterward said she never meant to break the leg of her infant daughter.

"This was an accident,"Jennifer Rose Bellis said after court, while standing in a hallway at the Butler County Courthouse.

Bellis said she pleaded guilty to child endangerment only because she did not think a jury would believe the truth.

She said her daughter, then 3 months old, got caught under her own leg and became twisted.

Bellis, who lived in Oakland Township at the time, was arrested in June 2007 after her daughter was treated at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh for a fractured right femur.

Today, while in the hallway, Bellis acknowledged that already she told officials at the hospital and Butler County Children and Youth her side of the story.

But the doctors who treated the girl said Bellis' explanation was not possible.

She will spend 2½ years in the county's Intermediate Punishment Program, during which she will spend the first three months on house arrest with electronic monitoring and the remainder on probation.