Baby Ignored in Life Befriended in Death

While her brief, tortured life was memorialized Saturday, the body of “Baby Jane Doe” lay wrapped in plastic in a storage room at the Los Angeles County morgue with a tag on her toe labeling her “Jane Doe No. 61.”

The handful of mourners gathered at the Park Hills Community Church in Windsor Hills prayed that a baby they had never known would find peace in death that she had not found in life.

“She was defenseless, helpless and speechless,” said Alice Beard, the county social worker who organized the service. “She is a martyr to the cause of child abuse and neglect.”

Two months after her small, naked body was found lying on its side in the middle of an alley behind a Baldwin Hills apartment building, the abandoned child is still unidentified and unclaimed. The person or persons who let her starve to death and then dumped her body are still unknown.

Picture Adorns Altar

The coroner’s office cannot yet release her body for burial, but a picture of her emaciated, bruised face--behind a spray of flowers--adorned the altar at Saturday’s service.

The remembrance was held “to remind the public about the ugliness of child abuse,” Beard said, “and to show that, even though that baby had an enemy in life, she’s gained some friends in death.

“I look at this child as the child I never had. I know someone would have been glad to take the baby if the parents were willing to give her up (for adoption). But to neglect her like that for that long, then dump her naked body in an alley. . . . I can just imagine what she has gone through . . . the agonizing pain of hunger.”

Police say the child apparently died of pneumonia brought on by malnutrition. She was about 10 months old and weighed just 14 pounds--”a pathetic-looking sight,” one investigator said.

To help solve the mystery of the child’s death, Beard took up a collection for a reward fund among her co-workers in the county Department of Public Social Services child abuse unit. The $380 she raised was turned over to police and added to a $5,000 reward offered by the Los Angeles City Council.

No Information Turned Up

But neither the reward nor extensive door-to-door questioning of residents in the area where the body was found has turned up any information that could help police.

Police are in the process of questioning doctors and emergency room staff members at local hospitals where the abused child might have been treated, and they are searching the national list of missing children for any clue to Baby Jane Doe’s identity.

Over the years Los Angeles police have investigated the deaths of dozens of unidentified men and women, “but never a child,” said Lt. Vance Proctor, head of the child protection unit.

“If this child (had been) kidnaped, you can bet (there would have been) instant reporting” of her absence, he said. “A little 10-month-old baby doesn’t just disappear. Somebody has to know something.”