THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 13, 1996 TAG: 9602130234
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH LENGTH: Long : 123 lines
Baby Angel Valentine could've been a year old today, if someone hadn't thrown her in the trash right after she was born.
Her body, still warm when found by workers plucking aluminum cans for recycling, came from any one of several area cities. To this day, police don't know who the newborn girl was, or her parents. There were scant clues. No leads that went anywhere.
Angel was Portsmouth's first homicide victim in what turned out to be a tragic record year; she remains one of nine unsolved cases from the city's 37 slayings in 1995.
She lived, at most, a few hours. She was treated as shabbily as a human can be - dumped, unwanted, in the garbage. But the plump baby with the light-brown skin and long, curly black hair has had a long-lived effect on others.
After suffering the coldest treatment that people had to offer while alive, she's drawn some of the warmest feelings from them in death.
Strangers gave her a name. They donated a casket and a grave and a funeral. They prayed for her, wept for her.
Among the strangers are two who still visit her a year later, regularly stopping by the donated, heart-shaped grave marker in the front row of the children's section of Greenlawn Memorial Gardens in Chesapeake. The marker reads: ``Baby ANGEL VALENTINE, Feb. 13, 1995.''
Portsmouth police Detective Robert L. Simmons Jr. last week replaced faded lavender flowers at the gravesite with a fresh spray of seven bright-red carnations enveloped in baby's breath, donated as always by Portsmouth florist Willie Jones. The detective, who visited the grave with his partner, Detective Melvin Hike Sr., didn't disturb the small stuffed bear in faded pink and lace that someone had left.
Simmons goes to the cemetery about once a month. The visits are partly investigative. He checks over things left on the grave - a toy, a card - hoping to glimpse some clue to the girl's identity. Police watch the grave from time to time, hoping to see new faces. Maybe those of guilt-stricken parents.
So far, however, their gravesite vigils haven't turned up much.
``There's not a lot of activity there,'' Simmons said.
That figures. From the beginning, the case was a mystery. Angel's body was found in a mixture of garbage collected from four area cities. Simmons is still trying to trace some of the trash found with the body to specific neighborhoods.
There were no reports from area hospitals of women seeking treatment for just having given birth. People told police about women they believed had ended pregnancies recently but had no new children. Simmons interviewed 10 such women, even conducted voluntary genetic tests on three of them. Nothing.
He believes Angel's mother may have been a teenager, a girl who possibly hid her pregnancy from family and friends. But at the same time he finds it hard to believe that someone could completely hide a pregnancy from everyone, baggy clothes or no.
``I would hope that, eventually, that person would confess, or tell someone,'' Simmons said. ``If it was an adult, and that adult was here, I always get the feeling that they would visit the grave or something.''
But some of Simmons' visits are personal, too. Police rounded up donations of money and services to formally bury the infant. They took it upon themselves to become family to a girl with none.
In a city plagued with slayings, Angel's wasn't just another homicide case to police.
``It stands out because, one, you're talking about a child,'' Simmons explained. ``It's a case where someone threw a kid in the trash. That's not something you forget.
``Because the child did not have any family, I took it upon myself to basically keep a check on the grave.''
Angel's case literally stays with Simmons day and night. He carries only two old case files with him wherever he goes, always ready in case he runs across someone who might know something. One is from an ancient robbery. The other is Angel's, a 2-inch-thick manila folder stuffed with reports, notes and photos, including some of Angel's casket - white, fiberglass, the size of a picnic cooler - - photos that seem to have little investigative value.
Simmons, who is unmarried, has no children of his own.
``It's close to my heart, and I don't forget it,'' he said. ``Because every time I go through my bag, it's always there.''
Also stopping by Angel's grave every month or two is Ida M. Carter.
A year ago today, Carter was in the cold Southeastern Public Service Authority trash-to-fuel plant, pulling out aluminum cans and tossing them over her shoulder into a bin, when what she thought to be a discarded doll turned out to have soft, still-warm skin. Co-workers scrambled to stop the conveyor line before Angel's body would've been chopped to unrecoverable tiny pieces.
Carter named the infant and attended her funeral with a co-worker. Carter still brings flowers and rattles and such to the grave - last week, she left more flowers and a stuffed bear with an angel on it in anticipation of today's birthday.
She often brings some of her 10 grandchildren to the grave. Last week she brought two of them.
``I want them to know that, even though we didn't know her, she was special to Grandma,'' Carter explained. ``I feel like she was just one of my grandchildren.
``I will never forget her. Never forget her.''
Carter now works nights as a nurse's aide at a convalescent home. But she still dreams about finding the girl's body in the trash, of a police officer zipping it into a bag, of an open casket with Angel dressed all in white.
She prays for the parents, hopes that someday they'll come forward and admit their mistake. At the same time she agonizes aloud, asking why they couldn't have left a live Angel on someone's doorstep or in a hospital's parking lot.
A year later, seeing young babies can still sometimes move Carter to tears.
``She's just a part of my life now,'' Carter said of Angel. ``I talk to her. I tell her I know she doesn't know me, but I'm her new grandmother. I know she's in heaven. I tell her, whatever happens, someone down here still loves her.
``I hope someday, when I leave this old world, I can meet her, and give her a great big old hug, and let her know someone loves her.'' ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPHER REDDICK color photos/The Virginian-Pilot
Detectives Robert L. Simmons Jr., foreground, and Melvin Hike Sr. at
baby Angel's grave.
Ida M. Carter found the baby, named her and went to the funeral.
Today she visits the grave, often taking her grandchildren along.
KEYWORDS: ABANDONED BABIES AND CHILDREN by CNB