When Erica Shryock heard her baby screaming at 7:30 a.m., she thought the girl was hungry, an affidavit said.

She got up to feed the infant, who was then just 15 days old, and noticed that she was covered in blood, police said.

Shryock told authorities that she and the baby’s father, Charles Elliott, had been sleeping in the same room with her daughter at the Magnolia, Arkansas home, court documents said. Police told her the girl had to have been screaming for a while due to the amount of rat bites, according to an affidavit obtained by the Democrat-Gazette.

An examination at the hospital in May 2017 revealed that the 5-pound child had been bitten at least 100 times by rats — and the bites were severe, police said.

Elliott said he’d seen bloody rat footprints in the crib when he woke up, authorities said. But he said the couple “hesitated” to take the baby to the hospital because they didn’t want their daughter to be taken away from them.

Both parents, however, told police they knew rodents were in the home, but never addressed the issue, authorities said.

When police searched the home they found even more blood: it had covered a bassinet with rodent footprints on it in the living room, soaked an infant toboggan on the floor of the room they had been sleeping in and stained a baby blanket. Officers also found a wooden cabinet on which there were rodent droppings, police said.

Doctors told detectives the baby suffered severe skin destruction from “rat feeding,” a process that likely would have taken hours to occur.

The couple was either absent or incapacitated to not have responded, doctors said.

The couple was arrested a few hours after they took the baby to the hospital, authorities said. Shryock admitted during an evaluation that she had used marijuana, the street drug K2 and methamphetamine in the days leading up to her arrest, The Democrat-Gazette reported. Elliott said he had smoked marijuana just before the arrest and had used methamphetamine and K2 the previous year, the newspaper said.

The baby had facial reconstruction surgery for a large wound on her head, according to police.

Shyrock and Elliott both pleaded guilty Thursday to permitting the abuse of a minor, The Democrat-Gazette reported. They were each sentenced to five years behind bars, the newspaper said.

The child has since been adopted, according to the newspaper.