Denied Life but Granted Dignity

He never had a name. Just a number. Coroner’s case No. 973193.

But the infant found in a trash can on the southeast corner of Olympic Boulevard and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles received the dignity in death that he was denied in life.

Finally given a name by police, Baby Michael and two other abandoned infants were buried Saturday by strangers determined to see that children who die unloved at least do not go unmourned.

About 100 people listened as songs were sung and prayers offered over the tiny blue and pink coffins at a cemetery near Calimesa, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles.

The service was organized by the Garden of Angels, a year-old group that so far has buried seven infants found dead in trash cans and elsewhere. Six of them were from Los Angeles County.

“I firmly believe they’re in a better place now,” said Debi Faris, who helped release seven doves at the end of Saturday’s hour-long graveside service.

Faris, a 41-year-old Yucaipa mother of three, created the Garden of Angels after hearing a news report about a baby found dead May 29, 1996, in a duffel bag next to the southbound Harbor Freeway in San Pedro.

“The thought of that little boy just wouldn’t leave me,” she said.

The next day she called the coroner’s office in Los Angeles and was told that the baby’s remains would be cremated if the body was not claimed within 30 days. Faris asked to be notified if it was not.

When the coroner’s office called her back a month later, Faris decided to bury the baby herself. The first mortuary and cemetery she contacted volunteered their help.

But by the time the funeral was organized, authorities had told Faris about two other abandoned babies--a boy found in a trash bin at Main and 25th streets in Los Angeles and a girl washed up on a private beach in Malibu.

Naming the three Matthew, Nathan and Dora, she buried them last Aug. 26. A boy found in a trash can next to Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu was named Jordan and buried April 5.

On Saturday, the two infants buried with Michael were a boy found dead in the yard of a Compton home May 6 and a girl found dumped off Highway 74 in Riverside County’s Valley Vista area April 28. Faris named them Daniel and Sarah.

The service included an escort to the cemetery led by Los Angeles police officers who discovered two-week-old Michael in a downtown trash can May 3.

“I was hoping it was a doll,” said the first officer on the scene, Sgt. Beatrice Yearwood--a 12-year police veteran who is the mother of a 9-month-old daughter.

When Yearwood asked the coroner’s office what would happen to the tiny body, investigators there told her about the Garden of Angels. Yearwood called Faris and asked to come to the funeral. Faris asked her to name the infant.

“I named the child Michael. That is the name of the patron saint of law enforcement,” Yearwood said Saturday.

Officers Calvin Hill and Ralph Sanchez and Police Chaplain Steve Preston accompanied Yearwood to the funeral.

“It really touches you when something like this happens in the neighborhood where you work. This was devastating. He was a healthy infant left two blocks from a church. They could have left him on the steps there,” Sanchez said.

Authorities say newborns are increasingly being found abandoned. Teenage mothers, transient women and undocumented immigrants are often suspected. But not always.

On Friday, the body of a newborn girl was found in a garbage bin behind a Telegraph Road bank in Santa Fe Springs. Whittier police Saturday said they had located the suspected mother, 32, whom witnesses had described as having dark blond hair and driving a new red Isuzu Trooper or Rodeo.

About 15 thrown-away babies are discovered each year in Los Angeles County. Faris has made arrangements to bury abandoned babies from Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties, as well.

“No one in this department can understand how anybody can do it to a child,” said Scott Carrier, spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

Until the Garden of Angels was started, newborns were treated like other unclaimed bodies and cremated by the county. Ashes were held three years before being placed in a common grave marked only by a stone with the year engraved on it, according to Carrier.

“For years my office has been trying to find a way to have these abandoned babies buried,” said Doyle Tolbert, a deputy coroner’s investigator.

“They deserve something. They don’t deserve to be thrown out in the garbage. They deserve more respect than their parents gave them. These babies weren’t just abandoned. They were out-and-out murdered.”

Several local groups have tried in the past to conduct funerals for infants. A Downey couple buried more than half a dozen a few years ago. Once, a South Bay group conducted rites for an abandoned infant, and schoolchildren collected pennies to pay for a headstone, Tolbert said.

Tolbert and his wife, coroner’s investigator Gilda Tolbert, hugged Faris when she and Michael McIntire, manager of Emmerson-Bartlett Memorial Chapel in Redlands, came to the morgue with tiny blue caskets for Michael and Daniel.

Emmerson-Bartlett has donated mortuary services and caskets for each of the infants. The Desert Lawn Cemetery has agreed to provide markers for the 44 grave sites that Faris has reserved. Faris is relying on fund-raisers and donations (The Garden of Angels, P.O. Box 1776, Yucaipa, CA 92399) to finance the plots.

“I’m committed to pay $291 a month until February of 2004,” she said.

Faris said those spaces could fill up quickly at the sad rate things are going. She will buy more plots if needed, she said.

Babies that never had a cradle, she said, should at least have a coffin.