Baby-Buying Tale Is Cover-Up for Teen-Age Parents

When Robert Garcia told authorities that he bought a baby from a drug addict for $10, police officers and child abuse experts thought that the story was too bizarre to be true.

They were right.

“The whole story was bogus,” Police Chief W. Douglas Franks said at a news conference Monday afternoon, explaining that Garcia and his 17-year-old girlfriend are the parents of the healthy, eight-pound boy. “I know it’s hard to believe, but kids can be very creative.”

Garcia, 18, confessed that he had concocted the twisted tale, as reporters from around the country and overseas, swarmed on Tustin police headquarters, eager to find out more.

“It wasn’t until someone made him out as a hero that he got a real case of the ‘guilties,’ ” Sgt. Mark Bergquist said. “After that it was real easy to get him to tell the truth.”

The baby was brought to Orangewood Children’s Home Monday afternoon, and a hearing is scheduled for Wednesday to decide his fate. Police say they believe that the teen-age couple and the girl’s single father may take responsibility for the child.

No family members were available for comment.

Garcia, who lives with his mother, could face charges of filing a false police report, a misdemeanor; having sex with a minor; and child abandonment, which can be a felony. But police seemed sympathetic to Garcia, painting him as a confused young man trying to do the right thing.

“You have to look at what they tried to do with the child,” Bergquist said. “They didn’t put it in a dumpster, they didn’t put it on a doorstep. He is very embarrassed; he is very remorseful. He’s apologized a hundred times.”

Police said the girl, a junior at a local high school whose name was not released because of her age, told no one but Garcia about the pregnancy, which went to term. Her father assumed that she had just gained weight.

“She was wearing a lot of baggy clothes,” said investigator Amelia Cerda. “When you want to hide something, you can. She did.”

The girl delivered the baby herself, at home, Saturday morning while her father was at work and then called Garcia for help. Both youths live in the Santa Ana-Tustin area.

Together, police said, Garcia and his girlfriend brainstormed for a way to give the child up without admitting that they were the parents. Garcia then went to St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church, but he found no one there, so he called the Child or Parental Emergency Services hot line.

“We’ve had a lot of crisis calls but none like this one,” said Michele Ornelas, the COPES worker who spent 10 minutes talking to Garcia before police arrived to take the baby.

The police took the infant to the hospital and filed a report of Garcia’s false encounter with a stranger who was eager to trade his baby for a fix. They recorded Garcia’s fictional offer of $10 in exchange for the infant and how he rescued the baby, wrapped in a T-shirt, from the stranger’s back seat.

From the beginning, the story seemed suspicious to authorities.

“It didn’t take a rocket scientist to think that this didn’t make sense,” said William G. Steiner, director of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation, which raises money for the home that shelters nearly 3,000 abused, neglected and abandoned children each year.

“It reflects the times . . . it reflects the recession, the social isolation, and a lot of pressure on people. When I see these abandonments of infants, it’s a very desperate act.”

Steiner said about 50 children, including half a dozen infants, are abandoned in Orange County each year. Across the country, more than 12,000 children were abandoned in 1991, according to the Chicago-based National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse.

Steiner, who has worked with abused children for 32 years, recalled a case about a decade ago in which a 17-year-old who had given birth unassisted in her home lied to police, saying someone had given her the baby at a bus stop--a situation very similar to the Garcia story.

“(Garcia’s) baby was luckier than most, even with the bogus story,” Steiner said. “This child still has hope for the future.”

Times staff writer David A. Avila contributed to this story.