‘It Can’t Happen Here’ : Simi Valley Asks Tough Questions in Wake of 2 Dead Baby Cases

The girl was 15. Maybe her parents knew she was pregnant, and maybe they didn’t--the police won’t say. Alone in her bedroom one night in January, she gave birth to a baby daughter. Within seconds, the infant was dead.

So the girl wrapped this small body in a green plastic trash bag. She went behind an Alpha Beta supermarket and left it in a dumpster. A man picking through garbage found it the next day.

People in Simi Valley said this was the kind of story you read in Los Angeles newspapers. Except this time it happened in their town. Police said nothing like it had ever happened in Simi Valley.

Then it happened again. On Nov. 17, a dead baby girl was found in a shopping bag on the road to the town dump.

Nearly 100 mourners attended separate funerals for the infants, Baby Jane Doe I and Baby Jane Doe II. Simi Valley police officers took up a collection for the headstones, and the babies were buried side by side.

‘Full of Good People’

“Simi Valley is full of good people,” Detective Sgt. Tony Harper said. “This just sickens them.”

The bedroom community of 95,000 is in many ways sheltered from urban pressures and tragedies, as if protected by the Santa Susana Mountains that separate it from Los Angeles. There is one high-rise--six stories tall--and occasional traffic jams on the freeway leading out of town. There have been two murders this year. Amid tract neighborhoods of middle-class families, no one ever abandons babies.

“We’re good here,” said Karen Catrucco, a 17-year-old senior at Royal High School. “We don’t do things like that.”

Councilwoman Ann Rock said: “There’s always an attitude that it can’t happen here. When it happens not once, but twice, that’s a jolt.”

At Simi Valley High School, the abandonments still weigh heavy on campus, the principal said. One teen-ager said he has nightmares about seeing the babies. Holiday shoppers at Sycamore Plaza, a town gathering place of sorts, became visibly upset when the infants were mentioned.

“It was so large in our community that my 9-year-old heard about it at school,” said Cathy Rendon, who lives near the Alpha Beta where the first baby was found. “She came home and asked me why that would happen. You don’t have answers for those kinds of ‘whys.’

“I still get very emotional about this. I don’t like to think that those kinds of things happen at all,” Rendon said. “To have them happen where I live . . . that’s too close to home.”

Nowhere has Simi Valley’s frustration and anger been more apparent than among the city’s police officers. Tracking down the mothers has been trying for investigators because such cases usually offer few clues. In September, after months of going nowhere, officers questioned a youth about an unrelated burglary and were led to the mother of Baby Jane Doe I. She was arrested at her high school.

Last week, the Ventura County district attorney’s office decided not to file charges against the girl, who is now 16. She has entered therapy. Prosecution would serve no purpose, the district attorney’s office said.

Natalie Harrigan shook her head when told of the decision. The 17-year-old high school student said she knew of the teen-age mother through a friend.

“She was pregnant and all of a sudden she went flat, and the baby was nowhere to be found,” Harrigan said. “We got the clue that it was her.

‘Gone Way Downhill’

“Sick,” she said. “Simi Valley has gone way downhill.”

Councilwoman Rock and health officials worry that Harrigan may be right. They say that two abandonments in one year might not indicate a major problem but does warrant concern. (In the last seven years, only two other babies have been abandoned and found dead in all of Ventura County, according to the coroner’s office.)

In a small, conservative town like Simi Valley, some suggest, teen-age sex and unwanted pregnancies might not be discussed as openly as they should be. Rock and others wonder if Simi Valley has kept its eyes closed to a problem that eventually occurs in any growing community.

“The problem is not just the problem of losing tiny babies,” Rock said. “The problem is deeper into the social structure. Are we dealing with unwed mothers, mothers who are children themselves? I think that is a question the community needs to ask itself.”

Planned Parenthood officials in Los Angeles speak bluntly on this subject.

“There is little question that these two tragedies suggest there is a lot of sexual activity going on in the teen community,” said Dr. Hugh Anwyl, executive director of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles. “I would hope that the response is not merely to bewail and bemoan, but to see what can be done in a positive way to produce sex-education programs in schools and churches.”

Planned Parenthood does not operate a clinic in Simi Valley. A Ventura County Health Department office in the town offers birth-control counseling and pregnancy testing twice a month. County health officials say the Simi Valley clinic gets more teen-age girls than any other office in the county.

The only other public clinic in Simi Valley, the Simi Valley Free Clinic, provides a volunteer doctor who works one night each week performing exams and providing birth control.

‘Another Bunch of Strangers’

Free Clinic workers said Simi Valley doesn’t offer enough to teen-agers looking for such advice or medical help. If a girl wants birth control or pregnancy testing at their United Way-supported office, she must make an appointment up to one month in advance. If she seeks an abortion, she might have to visit as many as three different city or county offices, each time facing “another bunch of strangers who ask all sorts of questions,” said Lori Mitchell, a counselor at the Free Clinic.

That kind of bureaucracy, she said, doesn’t work with teen-agers.

“We get several calls a day, mostly teen-agers, and the younger they are, the more confused they are,” Mitchell said. “We’re in need. It’s kind of behind the times here.”

Administrators at the city’s two public high schools say they are satisfied with their sex-education programs, which are referred to as “Health and Family Life” classes.

“I don’t know that a principal is ever totally satisfied with a curricula,” David Ellis, principal at Simi Valley High, said. “These two incidents are indicative of something . . . but I’m not sure what. I’m not sure if the parents are to blame. I’m not sure if the schools are to blame. I believe we’re doing as much as we can.”

City Council has yet to address the issue. Rock says she hopes it will, but Mayor Pro Tem Vicky Howard doesn’t think it is the city’s place to delve into such matters.

“If someone wanted to start a Planned Parenthood clinic in the community, they would not have to come to the City Council,” Howard said. “I don’t see it as a governmental function. I don’t see that the impetus would come from the City Council.”

Dr. Elvin Gains, a private physician, said: “I don’t think anything has changed. I’ve been in practice here for 24 years and we’ve always had teen-age pregnancies. Fifteen years ago the girls would adopt out their babies. Now they have therapeutic abortions. Occasionally one slips through who thinks her problem is just going to go away, and it doesn’t.”

At lunchtime last Friday, the students from Royal High gathered outside a Foster’s Freeze just down the street from school. The parking lot was jammed with cars and rock music and clusters of kids. A boy with a pony-tail performed tricks on skateboard. Another group sat together on bicycles.

One student said the babies were discussed last week in his government class, but the subject has pretty much disappeared from gossip around campus. No one in that parking lot had been lectured by parents.

“My parents and I talked about it. It wasn’t a major conversation,” said Tiffany Werner, 16.

“My parents and I had that talk a long time ago,” another teen-ager said. “We have better things to talk about than dead babies.”

Parents and Sex

“My mom kind of talked to me, but she’s religious, so she doesn’t really talk about that stuff,” said Janine Rempfer, 17. “Parents don’t talk about sex.”

Meanwhile, at the Simi Valley Police Department, Detective Sgt. Harper searches without much hope for the mother of the second abandoned baby.

“Having seen both those babies in those bags, it’s something I’ll never forget,” he said. “It just breaks your heart. I’ve been here 13 years and I don’t think there’s anything I can remember that has drawn this community closer than these two incidents.”

At the Free Clinic, Mitchell said she is waiting to see if the municipal or county governments will come up with more money for clinics like the one she works at. And Councilwoman Rock wonders what, if anything, her town will do.

“To me, it is incomprehensible that anyone could take a baby and leave it in a dumpster,” she said. “I don’t know that it will open the community to asking why these things happen and what can we do. But isn’t that the measure of people, how we care for the less fortunate?”