COLUMN ONE : Starting Life on a Church Doorstep : In the two months since he was abandoned, Baby Boy Doe’s convoluted journey has put him on ‘fast track’ to adoption.

It was cold and dark when Pastor C. W. Van Gilder got up, as usual, at 5:15 to let out his dog Fergie. Suddenly, he heard Fergie bark. The sound was sharp, like a warning.

There had been break-ins at Van Gilder’s church next door, the First Baptist in Signal Hill, and he figured he should investigate.

As he rounded the corner from his apartment, he could make out a black bag on the church stoop.

“I turned the porch light on, opened up the bag and said, ‘My goodness, Fergie . . . we found a baby.’ ”

Only an hour or so after the infant’s birth, someone had wrapped him in a beach towel, put him in an oversized vinyl bag smelling of tobacco and left him squirming there, as silent as hope.

The baby, discovered April 7, was one of a dozen or so newborns abandoned each year in Los Angeles County by mothers who officials say are young, alone and driven by fear or emotional instability. They leave their babies in dumpsters, in public restrooms or by the sides of roads. Some walk away from them in stores or hospitals.

Possessing neither names nor known family, the babies present a puzzle for doctors and police, and a challenge for judges and social workers. If they survive, they sometimes become a surprise for relatives who are found and persuaded to take them in; occasionally, they are a prize for couples who have been waiting on official lists for years for a child to adopt.

Today, two months after his discovery, the Signal Hill baby is on the road to adoption himself, having passed through numerous pairs of hands in an odyssey of mystery, danger, celebrity and bureaucratic confusion.

Along the way, nearly everyone has given him a name--Kevin, Jim, Shawn Patrick.

Officials call him Baby Boy Doe.

THE HOSPITAL

It took only a few minutes for a Signal Hill police officer to respond to a 911 call from Van Gilder and race the baby to Long Beach Memorial Hospital.

About 5:30 a.m., toward the end of her shift, Val Lancer, the night charge nurse, took the black bag from the officer, who told her it contained a baby.

“Is it dead?” she asked. She looked in. The baby was quiet, it was not moving and it was cold. “It had what looked like blond, reddish hair. It was wrapped in towels that were damp, very damp,” she said later. He was not crying, which indicated to her that he might be in trouble.

“I picked that baby up and ran with it,” she said.

In the emergency room, a team of workers administered oxygen, cleaned potentially harmful fecal matter from him and wrapped him in blankets. To stimulate him, they flicked his feet and pushed him around on a gurney. Finally, on his own, he began to cry.

For a newborn left untended, outside, on a cold night, his condition was surprisingly good. He weighed a small but satisfactory six pounds and measured 19 inches. A drug test was negative. He was not tested for HIV or for alcohol, which is more common than drugs, but harder to detect.

Whoever delivered the baby had somehow cut and sufficiently cauterized the umbilical cord to stop the bleeding.

“Whatever they did, he looked great. He was a beautiful baby,” recalled Dr. Gail Carruthers, the night emergency room physician. “He was perfect.”

Some of the nurses started to call him Kevin. But, someone suggested, “Let’s call him Jim, he came in a gym bag.”

THE POLICE

Abandoning a baby is a felony. “If the baby died, homicide would be working it,” said Police Sgt. Daniel W. Cravens, who is in charge of efforts to locate the mother. At the time of night when the child was left at the church, his temperature could have dropped dangerously low or he could have been killed by a stray dog.

This was only the second such case that Cravens had seen in 22 years in Signal Hill, a 2.3-square-mile city with 8,200 people.

He urgently wanted to find the mother, as much to obtain medical information for adoptive parents as for prosecution. Also, to pave the way for adoption, parents’ rights must be legally terminated, and the law requires a diligent search before this can happen.

The effort to find the mother started that morning with a news release faxed to 17 television stations and newspapers. Officers called a news conference in the afternoon, where the baby and the black bag were photographed and displayed.

Because the baby was drug-free, Cravens figured the mother was probably not a prostitute. “It’s absolutely healthy. It looks like the mother took care of herself,” he said. He also suspected she was young. “A teen-ager is not taking the time to think things out clearly, and goes to the cliche mode seen in movies--leave the baby on the church steps.”

Also, he said, an older woman might have had the “common horse sense” to deliver her baby at a hospital, or leave him in an emergency room where he would be found within minutes.

He believed the pregnancy had been hidden by someone who had no one to confide in. The church was not easy to find and he suspected the mother might be a member of the congregation.

Within days, investigators would talk with two women suggested by Pastor Van Gilder. One, it turned out, was still pregnant; the other had never been. They called the local continuation high school. Nothing. They also investigated a tip about a pregnant woman named Lee reported panhandling at Ralphs, and even walked the railroad tracks, looking for transients.

“Nobody even saw the mother,” he said. “If we don’t get (her) in 24 hours or 48, it gets real rough.”

The first evening, several stations ran the story.

The calls started coming at 10 p.m., the first from a man who thought the baby might be his. But officials ruled him out after checking him out.

Most of the callers wanted to know if they could adopt the baby.

Social workers say people who find or see an abandoned baby on TV often consider it a sign that the baby was meant to be theirs. The answer is always no.

The reason, officials say, is that there are official priorities, protocol and procedures, notably a diligent search to find the parents and verify that they are indeed not interested in their child, and terminate their rights. Moreover, for every baby that a mother rejects, there are thousands of people in the county who have been screened and have been waiting for years to adopt. For a healthy white infant, that list is long.

After a night in the hospital, Baby Boy Doe was transferred to a foster home. But he would stay only a week.

THE MIX-UP

He was given to foster parents in Orange County. They felt as if they had won the lottery after receiving the call from officials. “We thought it was a mini-miracle,” said the father, who asked that his name not be used. He said the baby was healthy, looked Irish, like himself, and could have passed for a brother to the boy they were in the process of adopting. They already had a furnished nursery and had borrowed infant clothes and a swing. They called him Shawn Patrick.

But a week later, Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services workers removed the infant, telling the parents only that they were acting on “orders from above.”

“It was an honest mistake on my part,” said Mark Jadeed, an emergency social worker with the agency. He had placed the child with the couple through a private foster care agency, rather than a county-approved home. “We don’t have too many cases whereby a child is left like this,” he said. “So I was hazy on the procedure. I should have gone back and read the policies. Apparently, I didn’t.”

Under the policies, abandoned babies can be put on a “fast track” toward a permanent home within days, with a judge’s approval. In those cases, babies can be placed in potentially permanent “fost-adopt” homes with pre-screened parents, and adoption papers can be formalized in six months if relatives are not found, or are uninterested. Otherwise, the child must stay with a foster family for up to 18 months while the search continues.

“They didn’t fast-track the baby and (the Orange County woman) was apparently interested in adoption at the outset and it looked like I set it up this way,” Jadeed said. He didn’t make any deals with the family, but he said, “It could be interpreted that way.”

The potential to abuse the system with a human form of insider trading always exists, said Rex White, a children’s services regional administrator and one of those who ordered the baby’s removal. But he added, “The system does work, even when mistakes are made.” In his opinion, he said, “It was an honest mistake based on enthusiasm. It had nothing to do with the quality or stability of the initial home.”

The Orange County foster father recalled, “They came on Friday and took Shawn. They called at 5:30 p.m., came at 7 at night. It was devastating to us to watch our little boy cry and say, ‘Don’t take him.’ Just earth shattering.

“It was a surprising move to a lot of people. But the explanation was that he should never have been in our house to begin with. How can you argue with that?”

HIS NEXT HOME

“Here’s Andrew,” the new foster mother said a few weeks later, cradling the infant, who was bundled in a Mickey Mouse sleep suit and sucking on a bottle of formula. His skin was translucent, his head a fuzzy peach.

“At first I thought he had a Bob Hope nose, but now I think it’s a Richard Nixon nose,” the mother said.

Her modest home, filled with cribs, toys, blankets and bottles, had sheltered her own two children, now grown, as well as four foster children she and her husband have adopted, and a fifth they are in the process of adopting.

She asked that neither her name nor community be used to protect their privacy.

The doctor she consulted told her that Andrew is developing normally, although at first when he stretched, his arms and legs quivered uncontrollably. He has gained a pound a week and is getting longer. He’s not shy about letting his keepers know when he wants a clean diaper or to be held, and had kept her up all the previous night.

Soon, he was gurgling, and sucking on two of his own fingers to calm himself. His eyes closed and his face began to assume the various expressions of private baby dreams.

Sometimes, she said, he smiles into thin air. “Not at you. But he will smile. He looks around.”

One of her children who was also abandoned as an infant has taken to the new baby “like a duck to water,” she said.

The foster mother, now a grandmother, remembers when foster parents could choose whether to adopt the babies they care for. “My friend adopted a girl she found in a grocery store,” she said. “Now they’ve changed the rules. (The babies) automatically are going to go into adoptions and we don’t get a say unless they become unadoptable--chronically ill and nobody will take them,” she said.

“There are so many children in the system waiting, getting older by the day. It’s not their fault if they aren’t the perfect little child that everyone wanted. They’re lined up to get this one,” she said of Andrew. “What about the others?”

THE FUTURE

Ed Windsor, a program specialist for Children’s Services, said it is rare when no one comes forward to claim an abandoned baby or identify the mother. “Ninety-eight per cent of the time, we can identify someone. The number who proceed through the system and remain abandoned until they are adopted is almost nonexistent.”

By May 25, no one had come forward and a judge ordered “fast-track” adoption proceedings for Baby Boy Doe, anonymous sources said.

As a last resort, a notice will be published in the Los Angeles Daily Journal legal newspaper seeking information about the baby’s parents. If a parent surfaces, blood and genetic testing will be done.

The mother could receive probation instead of jail time, depending on her circumstances. The county could also provide her with counseling in an attempt to reunite the biological family.

“Not every parent who abandons a child is psychotic or totally dysfunctional,” said Evelyn Syvertsen, deputy regional administrator for the Van Nuys children’s services office. “Some people just feel totally helpless. They have themselves in some sort of circumstance and see no way out. In those instances, they’re doing this in the best interest of the child.”

Meanwhile, Baby Boy Doe will stay where he is, or be placed with “fost-adopt” parents who could become his permanent parents.

Rosemarie Kriesel, a county social worker and adoptions liaison, has already started a “what-if” search, generating a list of possible families from parents who indicated a willingness to take a child with an unknown background.

She started with families who had been waiting the longest and those with matching racial-ethnic background. In this case, she also sought people who said they would be willing to get therapy if Baby Boy Doe starts questioning his identity.

“He’s going to have a lot of feelings about his abandonment,” Kriesel said. “They have to be able to deal with this issue.”

She encourages adoptive parents to tell the truth, as early as possible, and to be as positive as they can. “In his case, he can be told that his mom left him in a place where she knew someone would find him. She left him at a church. She could be young, overwhelmed, feeling like she wanted a better life for him. That if she left him at church, he would be safe and go to a loving family.”

Even children left to die in dumpsters can be told: “You were found and saved and we’re so happy we have you now.”

One parent who adopted a dumpster baby said years later: “We pointed out that God was watching and he knew when he was going to be thrown in the trash can and had a man hear him cry and pull him out before he died. He knows that he was miraculously saved from anything bad happening to him, and he’s accepted that.”

Unless his mother comes forward to claim him, Baby Boy Doe--once abandoned, now ardently desired--will be in a permanent, adoptive home by Thanksgiving.

Either way, he will at last have his very own name.