CAMARILLO : Infant Dumped in Toilet Was Alive
A newborn baby boy whose body was found in a portable outdoor toilet last week in Camarillo was alive when he was dumped there, a spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.
The body of the full-term infant was found at 4:30 a.m. July 30 as a worker pumped and cleaned the chemical toilets used by farm workers. The toilet had been moved earlier to Camarillo from a Saticoy onion field.
“The baby was alive when it was in there,” said Ventura County Sheriff’s Lt. Joe Harwell. He died after inhaling fecal material, according to a spokeswoman for the county coroner’s office.
Authorities are searching for the infant’s mother, whom they believe to be a Mexican transient farm worker in her early 20s. The woman is a suspect in a similar case that occurred in May, 1990 in Oxnard, Harwell said. In that case, the baby survived.
“We have information she may be heading for Mexico,” said Harwell, who declined to identify the woman.
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