ANAHEIM : Mother of Baby Found Dead Is Freed

Police on Tuesday released a 19-year-old woman whose dead infant had been found in a Dumpster, saying they had no proof that the baby was born alive.

Police said that Alejandra Baena, 19, of Santa Ana told investigators that the baby was stillborn. A preliminary coroner’s report Tuesday said that an autopsy had failed to establish whether the badly decomposed, 3-day-old body had been a living baby, and so murder charges could not be pressed, Sgt. Chet Barry said.

Further information from the coroner’s office is pending, and the investigation is continuing.

“The thing that we’re really looking at is did anyone else ever see the baby move, did anyone see that it was, in fact, breathing,” Barry said.

Baena, who speaks only Spanish, concealed her pregnancy from most of the residents of the Anaheim apartment complex where she has lived weekdays for two years as a baby-sitter for Maria Candida Romero. She was arrested there Monday.

Although some residents there said they saw the baby in trash that Baena was carrying Friday afternoon to a nearby Dumpster, Barry said, no one is being considered as an accomplice to the baby’s death.

Claudia Romero, 16, one of Maria Candida Romero’s children, said she had no idea that Baena was pregnant. But she said her mother told her after Baena’s arrest Monday that she had known the baby-sitter was pregnant and had offered to let her and the new baby stay at the apartment with the family.

Claudia Romero said that Baena came from a strict family and was not allowed to have a boyfriend until she was 21, but that she had been seeing a boy secretly for about a year.

The two teen-agers rarely did things together, she said. She characterized Baena as an “innocent girl” who “never went out,” adding that when she wasn’t with the Romeros, she was with her boyfriend or visiting her own family.

“She’s the type that could be a nursery school teacher. She loved the kids, she cooked for us, and the place was always clean.”

Claudia Romero said she was going to work Friday when a friend of the family who also lives there noticed that Baena had been in the bathroom for hours. Claudia Romero said she asked Baena if she was all right, and she answered that she was fine, so she left without giving it more thought.