A Fitting Farewell : Mourners Pay Their Respects at Funeral Service for 3 Abandoned Babies

LA HABRA —  With his wife and four children beside him, Joseph Sabala walked out of Emanuel Lutheran Church on Thursday evening covered with tears.

The 34-year-old Anaheim man and his family had just paid their respects to three abandoned babies whose bodies were found in Orange County four months ago, apparently in unrelated cases.

“Who knows what those children could have been,” Sabala said, blotting his face with a handkerchief. “They could have been lawyers or doctors or discovered the cure for a disease. Somehow, somebody knew about these children. They never had a fighting chance. Where has society failed?”

The Sabalas were among the more than 35 people who stopped by the church for the visitation and a funeral service officiated by Father Patrick Callahan, associate pastor at St. Matthew American Catholic Church in Orange.

Callahan had asked the coroner’s office to release the infants’ bodies for proper burials once investigations were completed.

“My main concern was that these children might just be cremated and buried in a common grave as Baby Does,” Callahan said.

At the front of the church, local Boy Scouts stood at attention beside each tiny casket. The light blue casket containing the male infant, who was named Michael, was covered with violets. The caskets of the female infants, named Ariel and Angelica, were covered with pink carnations.

“We decided to give them angels’ names,” Callahan said. “They are considered to be angels and went right back to God.”

Callahan said that holding the service was a way to “celebrate the fact that they were alive, even for a few hours or a day. Then they were discarded. Humans were born with a soul, and they deserve better than that.”

Tom Cilella brought his three sons to the service at the urging of his youngest son, 5-year-old Clif.

“We all felt really touched by the story of these infants and that no one would claim them,” Cilella said. “It’s a sad situation. There should be more care in the world.”

The deaths of the babies baffled authorities because they happened within days of each other.

On March 11, the body of a newborn girl with her umbilical cord still attached was discovered at the surf line in Newport Beach by a woman on a morning walk, police said. The next day, another newborn was found on Sunset Beach. Two days later, authorities discovered a dead infant boy in a cardboard box outside an apartment building in San Clemente.

Coroner’s investigators have not been able to identify any of the parents, so church officials assumed responsibilities for funeral and burial services. The infants will be buried at 10 a.m. today at Memory Garden Memorial Park in Brea, which donated the plots.