Baby Found Dead in Trash Can at Cypress Cemetery

A cemetery groundskeeper Friday discovered the body of a newborn girl dumped in a garbage can alongside a gravestone-lined road at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Cypress, police said.

Detectives were awaiting autopsy results to pinpoint when and how the infant died and perhaps who was responsible. Detectives were also pursuing several leads on women who may have given birth recently but were not later seen with a child.

The baby appeared to be no more than a few days old.

“It appears the child could very well have been alive when she was put in the trash can,” said Lt. John Schaeffer of the Cypress Police Department. “There is physical evidence to suggest that might be the case.”

Schaeffer declined to elaborate, except to say that there were no visible bruises or signs of trauma on the body. The baby may have been white or Latino, but that has not yet been determined, he added.

The infant could have been in the trash can for as long as two days before she was discovered around 6:15 a.m. Friday, Schaeffer said. Exposure and starvation are among the possible causes of death.

The discovery jarred employees at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park. The shaken groundskeeper who found the baby at the north end of the 60-acre cemetery was sent home early.

“It’s a sad, horrible, very unsettling situation,” said Forest Lawn Vice President Darin Drabing. “Nothing like this has ever happened here.”

He added: “When I came to work (Friday) morning, the police were already here and the area around the body was cordoned off, and now we’re just waiting for police to get back to us. We wish we knew more, but we don’t.”

It was the second abandoned infant found dead in Cypress in three weeks.

On June 17, a young Cypress mother of three was arrested on suspicion of killing her newborn baby after the infant was found dead in a plastic bag in a closet.