Strangers Mourn a Slain Infant : Memorials: Couple provides funeral for a day-old baby. They want to organize a group to provide burials for other abandoned children.

She had no name, no one to claim her--this newborn who was found beaten and dead in a dumpster behind a Downey apartment building.

But this child did have someone to mourn her. Ellis and Rose Horton, strangers to the child, decided after learning of her death in the news that the infant deserved a proper burial.

The ceremony lasted about 15 minutes Friday atop a green, sunbathed hillside at Rose Hills Memorial Park near Whittier. The Hortons stood side by side, Ellis Horton with his head bowed and Rose Horton with tears in her eyes. Before them was a pink, velvet-covered coffin, barely two feet long, covered with white daisies and yellow roses. Next to the grave, a miniature windmill made of tinfoil turned in the breeze, a child’s toy to mark the passing of a child.

This little girl, who lived less than a day, is the third unidentified infant to die in Los Angeles County this year. About five such cases are recorded every year, coroner’s officials said. Some victims are stillborn, some--like this child--are killed. All of them spend 30 to 60 days in the morgue before being cremated.

The Hortons, who live in Pico Rivera and have two small children, want to form a group to provide funerals for children who die and are abandoned. “We want to do something for children that have suffered and not been loved,” Ellis Horton said. He remembers reading about donors who contributed $20,000 to bury a duck that had been brutalized. “If people will do this for a duck, maybe they will do this for children,” he said.

Rose Horton learned of the baby’s death from a three-paragraph newspaper story. On Oct. 18, a transient discovered the newborn while rummaging through a dumpster for aluminum cans. Someone had killed the brown-haired, gray-eyed girl by striking her head against a hard object, such as the side of a table. The baby was found in a red plastic bag, umbilical cord still attached.

After a sleepless night, Rose Horton persuaded her husband that they should bury this infant, with or without outside help. “To cremate the baby, unidentified, without prayers, without anything--the horror continues for them somehow,” said Rose, who owns a Santa Fe Springs carpet store with her husband.

They waited almost a month while the Downey police tried to identify the child. Investigators are still trying to solve the crime, but their chances are remote “unless someone gets a guilty conscience or unless someone comes forward,” Detective Michael Carney said.

Rose Horton bought the 7-pound, 20-inch infant a pink dress, a white bonnet and white stockings. She asked that the child be wrapped in the blanket she used when she brought her own children home from the hospital. Morrow’s Mortuary of Pico Rivera prepared the body and provided the casket free of charge.

When the service was over, it was clear that this unknown child had touched the lives of people she never knew. Rose Horton was the first to clutch a handful of soil and let it fall through her fingers into the grave. Her husband followed. Then came the funeral director, a Rose Hills employee and a cameraman from a local television station who blinked back tears as he recalled a child he had lost.

Carney wanted to be there, but was called away at the last minute to investigate another crime. “It’s a real tragedy when a child who has never lived life, or seen what life is about, dies in this manner,” said Carney, who has four children.