It’s unclear as I write this whether the tiny body found in a travel bag was that of a boy or a girl.
It remains to be determined — at least officially — whether it was a near-term fetus or a very young infant who actually had a shot at living.
It’s not yet known whether he or she even had a name.
“The case is sealed. We’re not giving out information,” say Adams County coroners.
The body was found in a cloth sack Wednesday in a home on West 111 Circle in Westminster.
It matters, of course, whether it was stillborn or abandoned. Neglect and even murder charges pivot on such distinctions. Forensic tests will show how long the baby lived.
Meantime, we can assume that somewhere out there is a would-be mother who has something very sad to hide.
“This is a girl who obviously needed to be aware she had alternatives,” says Jodi Brooks, who knows a thing or two about unwanted newborns.
As a rookie TV reporter in Wisconsin in the ’90s, she covered the story of a girl who hid her baby in a backpack. She went on to report about a young mom who drowned her baby in a toilet. The news kept breaking all too often.
“Babies in Dumpsters, babies in canals, babies in the woods. It has become a theme in my career,” she says.
In 1998, Brooks persuaded leaders in Mobile, Ala., where she was working, to allow desperate mothers to leave their unwanted newborns at emergency rooms — no questions asked, and without fear of prosecution. A year later, safe havens became law in Alabama. Now all 50 states, including Colorado, have similar laws that are credited with saving 1,671 kids.
The profile of a woman who abandons her baby is a 19-year-old college student with no history of criminal behavior, or alcohol or drug abuse, as experts tell it. She’s a good girl (whatever that means) who doesn’t want her parents to know she has had sex. Panicked, ashamed and overwhelmed, she does the unthinkable by hiding her baby and leaving it to die. In cases of stillbirth, the bundles look much the same.
Brooks, now reporting for Denver’s CBS4, helped found Colorado Safe Haven for Newborns, a group that spreads the word about our own law. Since it passed in 2000, at least 29 babies have been dropped off at hospitals and fire stations here.
A few have been returned to their biological moms after counseling. Most are adopted by families who are able to care for them.
Konrad is now 5. He was dropped off at an ER hours after he was born. His adoptive mom, Shushawn Touryan, says she “won the baby Powerball” when social services placed him in her care the next day.
“Even if this law saved only his life, it was worth every hour that was put into it and every document that was written,” she says.
For every newborn saved by safe havens, it’s estimated that at least two more die from abandonment. Babies come and go, usually under the radar. Some are buried in shoeboxes. Some are thrown in lakes. The boy born to Erin Pendleton in 2004 was wrapped in a bag and tossed in a restroom at a Denver bar.
Touryan, Konrad’s mom, thinks often about his birth mother.
“I respect her tremendously,” she says. “If I were ever to see her or find out who she was, there’s nothing I could do or say to thank her enough for the gift she gave by believing in his little life and giving him a chance to live it.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
