Body of Third Dead Baby Found in O.C. : Tragedy: Abandoned infant is discovered in cardboard box in San Clemente parking lot.

The body of a dead baby--the third discovered in Orange County in four days--was found Tuesday inside a cardboard box in the parking lot of a San Clemente apartment complex.

Coroner’s investigators said the male infant was Latino, was less than a week old and had been dead at least 24 hours. A blue comforter and a beige blanket covered the fully clothed 6-pound, 7-ounce baby, whose umbilical cord was tied off with a red ribbon.

“I thought the box was litter, and I was going to dump it in the garbage,” said Craig Christian, the complex manager who stumbled upon the container. “It felt pretty heavy, so I popped it open. When a baby appeared, I immediately set the box down. I was shocked and dumbfounded.”

Unlike the two infant girls whose umbilical cords were still attached when they washed ashore in Newport Beach and Sunset Beach last weekend, the baby found at the Meadowlark West apartments, 3410 Avenida del Presidente, had been cared for before it was apparently dumped.

“This is definitely a baby who was taken care of,” said Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Tom Davis, chief of police services in San Clemente. “The baby was clothed and had on a diaper. This was not a baby that was just born and then discarded.”

Authorities don’t believe the three cases are related, although all are being investigated as possible homicides.

An autopsy was performed Tuesday on the male infant, but the cause of death remains unknown, Davis said, until toxicology test results are received in about six weeks.

However, he said, “the signs are more consistent” with sudden infant death syndrome.

In Orange County, where only one abandoned infant death was reported in 1993 and none the year before, so many cases within days has surprised law enforcement officials.

“The fact that you got fetal deaths and they’re being found on beaches and then a third baby is found dead, well, that is very unusual,” said Orange County Supervising Deputy Coroner Cullen Ellingburgh.

Figures for 1994 were not immediately available.

Parents who discard their babies are rarely caught, and the deceased infants are usually cremated, with their ashes buried in a grave marked only with the year of their death.

“In the cases where a baby has been abandoned, especially a newborn, only a very small percentage are ever solved,” said Orange County Chief Deputy Coroner Jim Beisner.

But investigators plan to scour San Clemente in hopes of finding out who put the baby in a box and left him in the parking lot of the brown stucco apartment complex near the southern border of San Clemente, several hundred yards from former President Richard Nixon’s Western White House.

Deputies today will start canvassing neighborhoods near the complex with a photograph of the infant. They also will visit area hospitals to check records of new births and notify area doctors’ offices, according to Davis.

When deputies arrived at the complex Tuesday, they quickly sealed off the area where the infant was found and in chalk drew an outline of a square representing the cardboard box.

Then homicide investigators were called to the scene, Davis said, noting that they were so careful not to disrupt evidence that they did not even pull away the baby’s blanket.

“That will be done by criminologists and coroner’s investigators with the hope that something, even microscopic evidence, can lead to the parents,” Davis said. Investigators will try to find out where the box came from and whether there were any special markings or store names on the infant’s clothing.

Wayne Scoles, a resident at the apartment complex, said he was leaving for work at 5 p.m. Monday when he saw an unfamiliar, clean-cut Latino male in his early 20s loitering where the box was eventually found.

Scoles did not see the box at that time, but when he returned home from work hours later, he said, he noticed it sitting on the pavement. He saw the edge of a blanket inside, but, figuring the box was left by someone who had moved recently, he went inside his unit.

“Personally, I think someone is going to come forward,” he said. “I think this was done by a person who was just not thinking straight.”

Christian, 45, said that after his grim discovery he walked to his office to call police while his wife, Cheryl, 39, checked on the baby’s condition.

“I didn’t know if it was dead, so I moved the box and the baby didn’t move,” said Cheryl Christian, the mother of two. “Her eyes . . . stayed closed and she didn’t move.”

It’s extremely difficult to identify somebody that young, according to coroner’s investigators. Adult victims usually have dental and fingerprint records, while an infant only a few minutes or days old has no recorded identity to trace.

“If we find an adult body, we have clothing and fingerprints and teeth, but with newborns we don’t have anything,” Beisner said.

Sometimes the cause of death by violence is obvious, and other times investigators find little evidence to prove trauma.

“It is not easy sometimes,” said Doyle Tolbert, an investigator with the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. “You look at these little things and think there are people out there who want babies and these are just thrown away. Some are pretty cute.”

In Los Angeles, six to 10 abandoned babies are found dead each year, he said.

Tolbert said the best chance of finding the mother of an abandoned baby is when neighbors call police to report that a woman who was formerly pregnant came home one day without a baby.

“But if the woman said she had an abortion or miscarriage, it is hard to disprove it,” Tolbert said. He added that investigators must show “probable cause” to order DNA testing of a woman’s blood to see if she is the mother of a dead baby.

If police do locate the parents, prosecutors have several charges that could be leveled at people who dispose of their infants--from improper disposal of human remains to child abandonment to homicide.

“In the majority of cases I’m aware of, it’s either the minor charge or the homicide and very little in between,” said Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Lance Jensen.

No matter how a baby dies, “these cases can’t help but get a little emotional,” said Jensen, who prosecuted one case last year involving a young mother who disposed of her baby in a dumpster.

Orange County Public Defender Shelly Aronson, who has defended two women accused of killing their newborns, said: “In both my cases, the mothers weren’t held criminally liable for killing their babies. Both of them were in situations where they had a baby on their own and the babies didn’t survive.

“The mothers ended up in a panic because they couldn’t get their baby to breathe, and they thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get blamed for this.’ People think every mother who disposes of her baby is a horrible person. The (mothers) I dealt with were not.”

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department asks anyone with information to call the homicide division and ask for investigators Vandor or Murray at (714) 647-7044.