Body of Newborn Found Discarded in a Trash Bin

She was a baby girl, but someone had wrapped her body in boy’s blue.

Not yet a day old, she became the city’s latest “Jane Doe” when her body was discovered Monday afternoon in a graffiti-scarred trash bin near Oakwood and Alexandria avenues.

Los Angeles police were asking for the public’s help in finding the person who put her there.

Investigators had no idea how long the newborn--described as white, possibly Latina--had been in the dumpster that sat behind a rambling apartment building across from an elementary school. They did not know whether she was put there dead or alive, if she had been stillborn or murdered.

The answers to those questions, said Lt. Richard Iddings of the LAPD’s child protection section, await an autopsy.

“If it’s a stillborn, we have a misdemeanor of discarding a fetus,” Iddings said. “But at this time, we’re treating it as a homicide.”

The discarding of a baby, the lieutenant said, “is rare, but it happens all over the city. Not just in the Rampart Division, or in South-Central Los Angeles. It’s out in the Valley, on the Westside.”

Iddings speculated that the mother, possibly high on crack cocaine, went into drug-induced labor.

“A young mother gets scared and they don’t know what to do,” he said.

Then again, the lieutenant said, maybe not.

Sometimes police solve these crimes, Iddings said, but “most of the time, we don’t.”

It was just before 1 p.m. when an unidentified man, sifting through the trash bin, found the baby’s body wrapped in a blue blanket.

He was “one of those persons who go around rummaging through trash for recyclable items,” Iddings said.

The man yelled to some people parked in a car nearby that he thought he had seen a baby in the trash bin.

Aurora Diaz, 51, a resident of the apartment building, said a young man and woman--apparently the car’s occupants--ran up to her as she washed clothes in the laundry room, telling her a baby had been found and that they needed to speak to the manager.

“I said, ‘Wait a second, I’m going to check,’ ” the Spanish-speaking Diaz said. When she returned with the manager, Diaz said, “the kids were gone.”

Isabell Marante, who has managed the building with her husband for 20 years, said her husband went to inspect the dumpster, saw the body and called police.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” the woman said. “This is such a quiet building.”

The crime scene was a curiosity to the children at Alexandria Avenue School, who got out of class in time to see police at work. They peered across the yellow police tape as school buses pulled up to take them home. They looked on as investigators dusted the green trash bin for fingerprints.

Jacob Aparicio, a 17-year-old resident of the apartment building, said he had been warned when he left Tijuana what would lie ahead in “El Norte.”

“All the people tell me this place is too bad, because of drugs and everything,” he recalled.

But he came to Los Angeles anyway.

Then, on Monday, he watched investigators pull the baby’s body from the dumpster. And now, Aparicio said, he believes them.