In Death, Babies Touched Many Lives : Reaction: None in O.C. were more unsettled--and introspective--than those who found the tiny bodies.

By NANCY WRIDE

March 31, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Naked and cold with umbilical cords tethered to their tummies, the baby girls were brought by the tide into the lives of a handful of strangers.

Even in death, the newborns who mysteriously washed ashore 10 miles apart in Orange County this month have indelibly touched the beachcombers, joggers and police officers who came upon them.

Investigators continue searching for the mothers whose infants were apparently cast to the sea, the first one discovered three weeks ago Saturday. They wonder like the rest of us how the newborns could meet such a disturbing end before their lives really began.

Then came the abandonment of a baby boy, whose blanket-swaddled body was found in a cardboard box at the edge of a San Clemente apartment parking lot. Three new borns abandoned in four days. What was going on?

None were more unsettled than those who found the infants during their ordinary visits to the coast.

One man offered to adopt or take custody of the first girl found so that, in death, she was given the respect she was deprived of during her flicker of life. A police officer was moved by the care bystanders bestowed upon the tiny corpse as they delicately tugged it with a bag out of the surf. One woman worries she will be haunted by memories of finding the baby if she ever experiences childbirth herself.

And the impact has been felt by more than just the clutch of people who discovered the newborns. Simultaneous memorial services to which the public is invited will be held for the infants at 6 p.m. Sunday at Newport Beach and Huntington Beach piers.

“Many felt a need to acknowledge this loss and validate the value of a single life,” as one organizer put it.

“Many people relate to these children as helpless,” said Dr. Mory Framer, a specialist in treating trauma victims at Barrington Psychiatric Center in Los Angeles.

“The children are the innocent ones. We (as a society) are supposed to take care of them. . . . Even for people who read about these cases, it can be traumatic,” Framer added.

It is more than an abstract ache for those who came upon the baby girl being rocked by the waves on the Newport Beach shore the morning of March 11. It has meant flashbacks and nightmares, a renewed faith in the compassion of others but also an edgy feeling that this story lacks an ending.

As she does each weekend, Julie Houston drove from her Garden Grove home to the Newport Beach pier about 7:30 a.m., looking forward to her stroll. It was her 36th birthday, and some of her 11 nieces and nephews had decorated her bedroom as a surprise. She was feeling good about being so close to the kids. The thought of one day having children of her own fleetingly crossed her mind, as it often did these days.

On her beach trips, she often finds “little treasures, like shells or sunglasses.” Once, she found charred driftwood resembling Capt. Hook’s peg leg and made a gift of it to her favorite little pirate lover in the family.

On this morning, a cup of steaming coffee in hand, she set out to walk from the Newport Pier to the Balboa Pier and back, her weekly ritual.

As she neared Lifeguard Station 11, she saw a clump of an unusual color washing up on the beach. As she got closer, “the air sucked out of me with disbelief,” she recalled later, during a lunch break outside the Irvine law firm where she works as a file clerk.

“I was stammering around, saying, ‘Oh, my God, what do I do?’ I was in shock.”

Her long wavy hair was whipping her face. She shivered in the morning breeze, surrounded by storm debris strewn on the beach. A couple strolling the waterline came along and she asked them to confirm what she thought she had discovered.

“There was this poor child. It was just oh! it was just opaque, purplish color. . . . I could see its little chin, its cute little eyes, it was just this little intact baby. It just wallops your own spirit,” Houston said with difficulty. “I reached down, but I wasn’t sure if I should touch it, if that would be bad. But I felt this urge to mother it.

“I was in tears, and I saw the couple. I asked the husband to look, and at first he thought it might be a baby seal pup,” Houston said. “He went down the beach a little and came back with his hand over his mouth and said, ‘That is disgusting that someone could do that.’ I was wandering around, going into my own shock.

“I could still see the baby tossing and turning in the waves of the shoreline, up and back. It’s not how a baby’s supposed to be treated--like trash!” she said with frustration.

As the couple headed for a phone to summon police, a jogger approached. He and Houston used a bag to pull the baby out of the surf.

“The seaweed, the wood, everything, her little arms tumbling around in the water, her little legs . . . I kept seeing the face, the color, this traumatic thing replaying itself. . . .”

Once police arrived, Houston said she felt more comforted that “the baby could have peace and settle in and its little spirit could do what it was gonna do. That’s what should have happened. . . . So many people want babies.”

She was quiet for a while, reflecting on what haunted her the most about the experience.

“That little girl will never get to taste oatmeal on her tongue, smell a flower, be 16 and going on her first date, try on her first dress, all those things were stolen. . . . Maybe because of this, I’m going to spoil my own child even more.”

As Houston struggled to keep up with the baby as ocean currents pulled it down the beach, Randy Jeffs jogged by.

A veteran runner who works in the insurance industry, he often jogs before going into the office. A powerful storm the night before prompted him to go down to the beach to see what nature had deposited that Saturday morning.

“I was running down the beach and . . . when I approached Julie she was standing on the beach and staring at my face, and she was horror-stricken,” Jeffs, 40, said this week from the Irvine home he shares with his wife and three sons.

“I said hello. She looked . . . traumatized, that’s the word. I kept running and took a few steps past her and I saw something in the water. At first I thought it was a dead seal pup, and I walked down to it, and the form looked somewhat human, but the skin was all gray. It looked like it was a seal pup whose skin had been removed. But obviously a seal pup isn’t going to have its skin removed. Then, I could see the form looked human, then I was thinking, ‘Gee, what looks human-like,’ and I thought it maybe was a monkey. But of course, it wouldn’t be.”

These thoughts, he said, flashed through his mind as he looked again at Houston, standing about 30 yards away now.

“Once I realized what it was, I turned around and looked at her, and I just, I don’t think we exchanged any words, I just started to look for something to pick the baby up out of the surf. It was in the water, and Julie had been following it, as it was drifting down the beach.”

The two hunted for something to retrieve the infant with. Jeffs found a plastic bag and used it as a glove to lift the baby to dry sand.

“Gradually, you realize you are dealing with a human and I was trying to figure how a person would do this, why? One of the reasons it didn’t completely emotionally devastate me, I think, was that it was hard to tell it was human at first. If it was a baby you could instantly recognize as a baby, it would have been a much more horrific experience.

“From my perspective,” he added, “I thought, what a terrible thing for a mother to have felt compelled to do, and I don’t think it’s just a verdict against the person who did it but the society who would make a person feel that this was that person’s only option.”

Concerned that police might not be on their way, Jeffs ran up to a beachfront house and knocked on the front door. “An older woman answered and I asked her if I could use her phone because there was a (dead) baby on the beach, and she started to cry right off,” he said. “It really affected her.”

Closest to the scene was Newport Beach Police Officer Tom Weizoerick, who pulled up in his squad car with his canine partner, Otto. Weizoerick walked along the sand at 10th Street toward Jeffs and Houston, whom he could see crying and pointing. He neared the baby, which was now lying face up on the beach.

A fellow officer of Weizoerick’s, Robert J. Henry, would be found on duty a day later with a gunshot wound in the head. He remains in critical condition.

“I think if it wasn’t for our officer being shot, I would be struck even worse (about the baby),” said Weizoerick, 29.

“My wife and I just had a baby girl six months ago, and this infant was bigger than our baby at birth.” He said the newborn’s body was in surprisingly good shape and appeared as though it might have only been in the water a few hours, although investigators later said they believed it was more like five to six days.

Officers sealed off the surrounding area with yellow tape and measured and photographed the baby and potential evidence. Jeffs and Houston spoke with detectives and awaited the arrival of a deputy coroner.

Half an hour after Jeffs left, he decided to return, a gesture that moved Officer Weizoerick.

“He came back to the beach and asked what would happen to the baby’s body if the mother or relatives were not found,” the officer recalled. “I checked around, then told him that the normal procedure was that the body would be buried in an unmarked grave at the county cemetery. He said, ‘Would they let me adopt the baby, then pay for a proper burial?’ It really kind of got to me that someone would do that. It stayed with me several days. He and Ms. Houston were the only ones who seemed to give the baby any chance at life.”

A day later and about 10 miles north, a second baby washed ashore, this time in Sunset Beach. Her body was discovered by a man who lives in the area, a 28-year-old termite exterminator who was poking around in what the ocean tossed ashore in the night’s storm. In a tangle of seaweed that Sunday morning, he spotted the dead infant. The man, like officers and passersby he summoned to the scene, said he was not comfortable talking about the find and wanted to put it behind him.

The following Tuesday, a dead infant boy was found outside the Meadowlark West apartments in San Clemente, and some who found the body speculated that the mother or someone else mistook the building as part of the church complex next door. The boy appeared to be less than a week old and well-cared for, his umbilical cord tied off with a red ribbon. Investigators believe he had been dead about a day. A blue comforter and beige blanket covered the baby in the box. The apartment manager, Craig Christian, stumbled upon the cardboard box and picked it up. “I was shocked and dumbfounded,” he said later.

It will be another month to six weeks before laboratory studies are completed for investigators, who are trying to determine what caused the infants’ deaths and when. One test will hopefully show whether there was oxygen in the cells of each baby, an indication of whether any were stillborn, Sheriff’s Lt. Tom Garner said.

“There will also be DNA tests done (on each baby) to see whether they were related,” he added. That possibility is considered remote, investigators have said.

Were they dead or alive when they hit the water? If they were not stillborn, why wouldn’t their mothers give them a chance at life--if not putting them up for adoption, at least leaving the infants in safety somewhere?

Nagging questions, they likely will remain unanswered. Such cases frequently go unsolved, police say.

But these newborns will be honored and acknowledged at two ceremonies Sunday. Msgr. John F. Sammon of the Diocese of Orange will conduct a service at the Huntington Beach Pier and the Rev. David C. Anderson, rector of St. James Episcopal Church, will oversee proceedings at the Newport Beach Pier.

Julie Houston will participate in the Newport ceremony, and will toss into the ocean a bouquet she has made of spring flowers.

She has given the infant she found a name “so we all remember that she was a human being,” she said. She decided to call the baby girl Justina Hope. She chose the first name because she likes it; she wishes for mourners to take heart in the last.