CALIFORNIA, 1998 The San Diego Union-Tribune…July 12,1998…The Garden of Angels
[substantially reduced from article]
The nauseating stench of death chokes the air in the “pickup area” of the morgue. She wears a mask over her nose and latex gloves as she hovers over a small gurney carrying a pint-sized corpse wrapped in plastic from an autopsy and bundled with ropes.
It has become a heart-wrenching routine. Steeling herself, she replaces the dirtied sheeting with clean plastic, and swaddles a tiny body, which was stored for three months in a cold crypt, in a cozy receiving blanket flocked with tiny pastel footprints and handprints.
Slowly and lovingly, she tucks each side of the soft comforter around the newborn who was never rocked to sleep. Then she, herself a mother of three, cradles a stranger’s dead child and carries it to a 2 foot long pale pink casket in her Dodge Caravan.
She snugly wraps the blanketed remains in a crocheted afghan inside the coffin, places a doll and a single yellow rose atop and snaps the lid shut. At the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, the red-haired, 20 inch girl was tagged “BabyJaneDoeNo.21”. She was given the name “Grace”. Grace was discovered in March by two 13 year-old boys who saw her body floating face down in 14 feet of water in the aqueduct. Sheriff’s deputies initially thought she may have been strangled before being dumped, although they may never know for sure because the body was badly decomposed.
If she hadn’t offered to collect Grace – and others before her – she would have been cremated like the other unclaimed bodies at the morgue and unceremoniously put in a common grave.
In death, however, the discarded have been adopted.
2 years ago she began burying the children, most of them infants, who, especially in Los Angeles County, turn up with horrifying regularity in trash cans, on roads, on front lawns and on beaches.
Wanting to give the castoffs a name and a dignified funeral, she and her husband became responsible for the money to purchase 44 small plots in the cemetery.
Soon as many as 150 people with no connection to the little ones show up to weep and pay last respects.
It seems to touch everyone.
A group of senior citizens started knitting baby blankets. Local school kids donated money from candy sales to buy toys to put in the caskets.
The macho guys from a ’50’s Ford truck club dedicated their cruise night to raise funds for burial expenses.
She called the 44 sites the Garden of Angels, and figured she would never see it filled in her lifetime.
Last month, Grace, the 31st child, was laid to rest.
She was cooking dinner that night 2 years ago when she heard the news report on television. A worker had found a dead newborn boy stuffed inside a duffel bag like someone’s soiled laundry. The suckling was tossed on to the shoulder of the freeway.
She couldn’t shake the story from her mind. Never before had she felt such a call to action.
Then she took a step that she knew would cast her as a suspect. She called the Police Department and then the Coroner’s office, asking if they could release the unclaimed body to her.
The police did check her out and quickly “realized this was just a one-of-a-kind person.”
Before she could even pick up the duffel bag baby, she found out from the coroner’s office that there was another full-term newborn boy that was strangled and pitched into a trash bin.
About the time that the coroner’s office was ready to release the 2 newborns to her, they told her about a 2 year-old girl who had washed up on a beach and was about to be cremated.
Too soon, there was a 4th infant, found by a transient looking for food in a trash can on a beach. The week-old baby wore a T-shirt and one blue booty – the other one he’d apparently kicked off.
The police and the coroner seemed to call nonstop.
The tiny plots began filling up. Each is topped by a white cross made by her father that she adorns with a pink or blue heart.
The interred now include “Patrick,” named by the detective investigating the newborn whom someone strangled with his own umbilical cord.
There is “Michael”, a 2 week-old who crawled out of his diaper trying to get to the top of the trash can he was thrown into. A police sergeant named him and sobbed at his memorial.
Why, the cops asked, couldn’t he have been left at their nearby station or at a church just a block away?
Some may have been born to panicked teenagers who hid their pregnancy from their parents or to undocumented workers or to homeless women. No one knows for sure, since most would-be caretakers are never found.
Police say there are likely many more infants who aren’t discovered, especially the trash-can babies whose final resting place could be a landfill.
It’s the morning of Grace’s graveside funeral.
As she goes into the cavernous, empty chapel, the sight she beholds is overwhelming. At the front, bathed in the glow of two torchier lamps and raised on a wood platform is the wee closed casket, beautifully decorated with a spray of daisies and carnations and a large pink bow that says “Darling Grace.”
She gently touches the cloth-covered coffin and silently prays.
A mortician carries the casket outside to a waiting black hearse. 3 weeks earlier, he loaded 7 babies, all from Los Angeles, into the same vehicle.
A man who showed up last week returns to play his Indian flute during the rites. Another, who provides white doves for free each service, is there with caged birds.
Amid the sniffles, there are songs, prayers, and a poem is read that was written especially for Grace. A cemetery volunteer releases one white dove symbolizing Grace into the blue skies. She lets go 30 more doves for the others buried in the garden.
There is pure silence as the grieving crowd watches the single bird circle around and catch up with the others over the nearby freeway. The flutist plays mournfully in the background.
When everyone is gone, 2 cemetery workers set the casket into a deep hole in the ground.
5 lines of miniature crosses, all over seen by 4 sculptured angels, sit on a nearby wall. Grace is the start of a new 6th row.
“It just gets overwhelming,” she sorrowfully says, staring at what could’ve been a classroom of kids.” I never in my life would’ve imagined burying 31 children like this.”
