Hope Dwindles in Finding Girls’ Parents

Police and child welfare officials have given up almost all hope of finding the parents of two baby girls abandoned in Oxnard two months ago.

A passing stranger found the two toddlers wet and crying Dec. 14 in the women’s restroom at Colonia Park in Oxnard.

Oxnard Police Detective Mike Palmieri said that by all appearances the parents or guardians do not want to be found.

“It’s just one of those baffling cases,” Palmieri said. “We just don’t know where to go from here.”

A witness told police that she saw two men and a woman visit the park carrying the two girls. She said they left in a black pickup truck without the.

Later, a man passing the park restroom told police that he heard the sound of crying inside the building and asked a woman to check. The woman found the girls lying in a pool of water and urine bundled in a blanket.

Police have ruled out kidnaping, Palmieri said. No one has reported missing children matching their descriptions. The girls may have been left at the restroom by parents who wanted them to be discovered by workers at a nearby day-care center, he said.

Ventura County Children’s Services, an agency that handles abused and abandoned children, has had no luck in tracking down the children’s parents.

Frank Ferratta, a program manager at the agency that oversees about 900 children who are dependents of the court, said only one or two babies are abandoned each year in Ventura County, usually by parents who cannot afford to care for them.

“In the 17 years of doing this work, I have not encountered such complete mystery,” Ferratta said. “We don’t have very many of these situations.”

If no one comes forward to claim the two girls, a Ventura County Superior Court judge in June will decide their fate, Ferratta said, adding that the agency will recommend that parental rights be legally terminated so that the girls can be adopted.

“At this time we’re in a holding pattern. We have to, by law, do all our effort in locating the parents,” Ferratta said. Ferratta said the search will be extended in the next few weeks into Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

Authorities have not determined whether the two girls are related.

The two girls have been placed temporarily with foster parents and have become accustomed to the elderly Ventura couple, Ferratta said. In turn, the foster parents have nicknamed the two Susie and Connie.

Susie, the eldest, may be as old as 18 months, and Connie is between 6 and 9 months old, said Laura Ayala-Clark, a county social worker assigned to monitor the two girls. Neither shows signs of physical or emotional abuse.

“The first time I saw Susie she looked like she was a baby that had been well cared for,” Ayala-Clark said. “She came right up to me, she was in my lap.”

The girls’ parents are believed to be Latino because of Susie’s responsiveness to Spanish words, but she has begun to learn English, Ayala-Clark said.