An Abandoned Baby Turns Up Cold but Safe

Michael Connors said he and his wife planned to have a baby someday, but he didn’t expect to find one Thursday morning on his dew-dampened front yard, shivering in the cold.

“I knew something was up so I brought him in the house and called the police,” said Connors, 29, of Garden Grove. “I gave him some juice and crackers” and watched the toddler “kinda stumble around” until officers arrived.

“He was in good shape, but he had dirty diapers,” said Connors, who is a delivery driver for a beer distributor in Orange. “He was cold, shivering. It looked like someone just sat him there . . . kinda in between the bushes.”

On Thursday night the boy was identified as 1-year-old Joshua David Walsh. A baby sitter who recognized Joshua’s picture on the evening news telephoned police and identified the boy’s mother as Danette (Dee) Walsh.

Joshua was reunited at the police station with his grandmother, Shirley Spurgeon Thompson, 40, and Spurgeon’s common-law husband, Eddie Thompson, 39, both of Costa Mesa.

Shirley Thompson said she had no idea where her daughter is. “I lost touch with her about a month ago,” she said. On about Feb. 15, she said, “I called her welfare agency in Santa Ana because she had left the motel,” the Kon-Tiki on Harbor Boulevard, where she was staying.

Pam French, a child-abuse investigator for the Garden Grove Police Department, said Walsh, who is about 19, 5-feet-6 or 7, and between 235 and 250 pounds, had “asked for cash assistance (welfare) in November. It’s just been a string of hotels down Harbor Boulevard since.”

Joshua, who was placed at the Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange, was dressed only in “a little red jumper with ducks on the front of it and disposable diapers,” a police spokesman said.

Connors’ home on the 12000 block of Flagstone Avenue is just east of Harbor Boulevard and less than a block from on- and off-ramps to the Garden Grove Freeway.

“He had a large drink cup in his hand from Jack in the Box (drive-through restaurant),” which is nearby, Connors said. “I had to do a double take when I saw it. He just sat there looking at me. He never cried the whole time.”

Connors said he had been outside earlier in the morning to get his newspaper and had not seen the baby.

“I noticed there was an old beat-up car out there. (When) I went back in the house, I heard what sounded like somebody get out of the car.”

When Connors left the house for work about 6:45 a.m., he discovered the baby.

Joshua, an only child whose father’s whereabouts are unknown, was born in Yuma, Ariz., and moved to Orange County with his mother, 13-year-old uncle, grandmother and Eddie Thompson in about October, the grandmother said.

Walsh “lived with me until right before Thanksgiving,” Shirley Thompson said.

But “she didn’t like being told she should take care of her son,” she said.

The grandmother said she “always worried about it (the child being abandoned) since he was born. She (Walsh) doesn’t seem to want to be responsible. . . .

“I said if you don’t want him, put him up for adoption but don’t hurt him. This fear was always in my mind that someday she’d just go off and leave him.

“It’s tearing me up. How can anybody take and throw her baby away.”

The baby sitter, Pam Spangler, said she had cared for Joshua in her Costa Mesa home during the Christmas season.

Walsh appeared to be a responsible mother, Spangler said. “She must have done something in the last three months to change her life,” she said.

Police Sgt. Bruce Beauchamp said Joshua “appears in good health. He’s not undernourished or anything like that. He shows no signs of abuse or anything. But he was very inadequately dressed for the type of weather.”

Connors said he is glad he discovered Joshua because “I really don’t live that far from Harbor Boulevard, so you never know what could have happened.”

Last year, authorities placed 52 abandoned children, “but only a couple of babies,” in protective custody at Orangewood, the county’s emergency shelter for homeless children, a spokesman said. A hearing on the child’s placement is scheduled tentatively for Monday, he said.