Garden of Angel

After laying dozens of tiny souls to rest, an American woman takes up the fight to save young lives.

By Gail Wescott

She has conducted the most solemn of rituals again and again, in the antiseptic crypts of the coroner’s office. After removing the plastic wrap, Debi Faris washes and rocks each baby. “You can always see a face, and I never forget it,” she says. “I rub their little hands and toes and say a prayer that people will be touched by this child. I take my time. Then I wrap the baby in a handmade blanket, place it in a casket with toys and poems and carry it to the car for the ride back. I need to be alone for the drive. I need the silence.”

Faris, 47, drives to the Garden of Angels, a small cemetery on a windswept hill. Six years ago, Faris founded the Garden, which has become the final resting place for 54 babies to date, all of them abandoned in trash bins, tossed along highways or washed up on beaches. “I know every one of these children’s stories,” Faris says. “I have become their voice. Even if they were here just for a moment, I believe they were here for a purpose-and that purpose is to make sure we stop having burials in the Garden of Angels.”

Her mission has transformed Faris from a shy, suburban soccer mum into a lobbyist and lecturer on the national circuit. She drives California’s highways in a silver car with a rear-window banner that reads: Don’t Throw Your Baby Away!

Faris journey began one evening in May 1996 as she stood at the kitchen sink in her two-storey home, cutting potatoes for the dinner she was preparing for her husband, Mark, a sales executive, her then teen-age sons, Brandon and Ryan, and daughter Jessica, ten. She was half-listening to the television when a new story caught her attention. A new-born boy had been found in a duffel bag along the highway.

“Tossed out of the window like trash!” she exclaims, still amazed. “It just stopped me. Who knew this baby? Who would bury it? What was the mother thinking?”

The following evening, Faris sat with her family and proposed they do something loving for the baby—that they give him a name and a proper burial. Jessica asked in amazement,”Somebody threw their away?”

“It touched them in the same way it touched me,” Faris says.

With no clue how to proceed, Faris picked up the phone the next day and dialled the police. “We had never received a call like that—ever,” recalls Detective peggy Leberknight whose first thought was that the caller was involved in the homicide. She referred Faris to the coroner’s office, where husband-and-wife investigators Doyle and Gilda Tolbert were equally skeptical. “We don’t get a lot of calls about dumped babies,” says Gilda. The Tolberts launched background checks on Faris, which revealed nothing untoward. When the Tolberts gave their approval, Faris began making burial plans for the bay she intended to name Matthew.

Then three weeks later, Faris learned from the coroner’s office that another infant boy had been found, strangled to death in a trash bin. “So we made plans to bury two babies,” she says. But when Gilda Tolbert called again with word that an unidentified two-year old girl had washed up on a beach, Faris said she would have to call back. “I had asked about one child and now three were there,’ she remembers. “I asked myself if I had the strength to do this. I sat at my kitchen table and cried—then picked up the phone and said we would be coming with three caskets.”

The first service at the Garden of Angels was held on August 26, 1996, for Matthew, Nathan and Dora. Faris’s father cut wooden crosses for the grave and Chris , then the music pastor at Faris’s church, led the prayers. “We wanted to surround the babies with a circle of love,” says Faris. At the end three doves were released to fly heavenwards.

Mark and Faris wrote a cheque for the burials and signed an agreement to purchase 42 additional plots. If there were three children already, there would be more, Faris reasoned. The $291 monthly payment was not undertaken lightly. “Our oldest child was starting college,” she says. “Our car kept breaking down and my husband had just gone from working for a corporation to a small start-up. But there needed to be a place where these babies could rest together.”

As it turned out, donors subsequently came forward with enough to cover the purchase price for the plots. “It was all small donations,” says Faris, who recounts how, after local newspapers published stories about the Garden, locals began visiting the graves and leaving money behind. Two little girls left a bag of coins amounting to $5, along with poems, toys and ceramic angels. Soon entire communities got involved. Senior citizens held a fund-raiser at a shopping centre. High school students volunteered to help grave-side plantings. And the dove lady donated her services permanently. The Garden of Angel had struck some primal chord.

Each time a baby was found, Faris drove alone to the coroner’s office to pick it up. Doyle Tolbert was amazed. “Sometimes I think it’s God showing an old cynic like me that there are angels,” he says. “Debi Faris is these babies guardian angel.”

Meanwhile Faris yearned to understand how a desperate young woman might feel her only option is a trash can. One mother, she learned, was a college student from a loving family, away from home for the first time. She gave birth in her dormitory room, wrapped the baby in a T-Shirt and put it down in the trash bin. Faris attended the young woman’s hearing and now visits her in prison, where she is serving five years. “I just wish she had been able to tell anyone,” says Faris.

But it was another case that turned Faris an activist. The day after the burial of baby Jordan at the Garden of Angel, a young woman dropped her healthy newborn at the emergency room entrance and disappeared. “People were outraged that a mother could abandon her baby like that,’ recalls Faris,” and I was outraged they didn’t see that she had cared enough to leave her child in a safe place.” Faris called a local TV news reporter and asked why police were pursuing the woman who had done the right thing. “I ‘m sorry, Mrs. Faris,” the reporter responded. “That’s the law.”

Well, replied Faris, it’s time that the law gets changed. She learned that in other parts of the US, a woman could leave her unwanted newborn in a designated safe place without fear of prosecution. She was determined to see California adopt similar legislation. It was not an easy process, but it became law two years ago.

In March 2001, Faris was devastated when baby Jacob was found next to a trash bin. “That was so exceptionally difficult,” she says,” because now we had this law. I wanted to stand on the rooftops and shout that this didn’t need to happen.” Faris realized that many of the women who needed to know about California’s Safe Heaven law—most aged 25 or younger—didn’t have a clue that it existed.

A few weeks after Jacob was found, a foster-care mother walked into the Garden of Angel’s tiny office, swaddling a baby with, says Faris, “dark curly hair and the blackest eyes you ever saw.” His mother had given birth in a hotel room and was thinking of putting him in a trash bin when she remembered hearing somewhere that she could leave the baby at a hospital and not get in trouble. She called the emergency. “ This is that baby,” the foster mother told Faris. “I felt you needed to know that this law works.” She handed the infant

‘It was like the world stopped,” Faris says, “Like nothing else existed except him and me. “The baby, it turned out, had been safely surrendered on March 31, the same day Faris buried Jacob. A couple plans to adopt the child, who has been named Jacob by his foster parents.

Faris only wishes there were more positive endings. In the 20 months following the enactment of California’s Safe Heaven law, 12 babies have been safely surrendered; 29 others were abandoned, and 17 of them were found dead. While two babies were safely surrendered within a week of each other last July, five newborns were abandoned, three of them dead in June. “It’s clear that word about all the people who need to hear it,” says Doyle Tolbert.

That is why, Faris says, “I’ll go anywhere to talk to anyone who will listen.” She now devotes her time to speaking to high school and college students—to any group that invites her—telling of the new law.

On a recent spring morning, a noisy gaggle of ninth-standard students jam a classroom. Within minutes, the room goes silent, the students riveted by the woman standing before them. She is talking about birth, life and death—and choices youngsters can make to define them.

“Secrets kill,” she says. “I know, because I’ve buried 54 of them. And I’ve learned that one person can make a difference. “ Faris continues, “If you just tell one person about this new law, you will have done something important. There are things in life worth standing up for.”

Article taken from Readers Digest February 2003.