With Discarded Baby, Horrible Sense of Failure
By Jenny Staletovich, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Originally published in The Palm Beach Post, June 3, 2001
WEST PALM BEACH — One day this winter, a frightened teenager gave birth in a toilet, then wrapped her newborn son in a trash bag and tossed him over her backyard fence. That same day, a grove worker stumbled upon the remains of a baby girl in a drainage ditch. A month later, another teen delivered her son in her parents' bathroom, packed his body in her school bookbag with a 10-pound weight, then dropped it in a canal.
Just two weeks ago, another small body was found—the seventh in just over a year in South Florida—decomposing in a duffle bag left at a bus stop.
Something frightening is happening in South Florida, reminiscent of a time when out-of-wedlock pregnancy was a mark of moral depravity.
Mothers are throwing away their babies.
Of the infants discovered, three lived. Four died. Only two of the mothers were found. Both—Wilmene Florestal of Lake Worth and Aimee Lynn Weiss of Tamarac—are teenagers. And both face murder charges.
Seven deaths might not seem like an epidemic, but to the people whose job it is to help needy mothers and infants, it's a crisis. As if teen pregnancy weren't troubling enough—particularly in parts of Palm Beach County where the rate is two and three times the national average—this new wave of baby abandonment has them asking why. Why, after so many years and so much money spent on sex education, pregnancy prevention and prenatal care, are babies being tossed in trash bins or left to drown in drainage ditches?
"Most people have sought help, so why don't these people get help?" asked Joyce Johnson of the Child Welfare League of America, which hopes to bring the matter to a congressional hearing.
With no hard data on the phenomenon, research is difficult, Johnson said. The closest thing to a hard statistic is a 1999 survey of national newspapers by the Department of Health and Human Services that found 108 babies abandoned in ditches, trash bins and the like in 1998. Thirty-three died.
Even the mothers offer few clues. Both Florestal and Weiss say they didn't know they were pregnant until too late. The baby girl found at a Miami bus stop May 21 came with a note attached: The mother said she'd been raped and was scared her husband would take her other daughter.
"People say how could you not know she was pregnant," said Weiss' stepmother, Cheryl Ann Weiss, tired of repeating again the answer that is almost too hard to believe. "Well, you know what? We didn't know."
Aimee Weiss, 17 when her son was born, has been indicted on a first-degree murder charge and could face life in prison. Her situation is not that unusual from the kinds of baby killings that make national headlines:
Good student who worked part-time to save money for a car for college. Quiet. Likes to please everyone. But there was a dark side. Life at home was tumultuous. And for the last year she dated a boy, the baby's father, who dominated her and talked spookily of an anti-Christ.
Until late 1999, Weiss lived with her sister, mother, stepfather and their four children in Boca Raton. Her stepfather, Eugene Thomas Hartman, said both he and Weiss' mother used drugs.
"We did the best we can despite what you read in the court reports," said Hartman, who pleaded guilty to sexual assault on a minor—not Aimee—in August 1999. "There was a time when Karen (Weiss' mother) and I made some really bad decisions and we've spent the last two years trying to do the right thing."
Weiss and her sister left her mother's home to live in her father's Tamarac townhouse, already cramped with three young children (a fourth was born in December). There, they were welcomed and lived happily, abiding by the family's rules and curfews, her stepmother said. But trouble followed.
Weiss was getting therapy, said her attorney, Ellis Rubin. And she experimented with self-mutilation, Cheryl Ann Weiss said. Later, her parents learned the boyfriend had been abusive toward her.
"She had done some things herself. Little scratch marks on her arm, just little. Of course that meant something deep down but all in all it was insignificant. But when she was with him, they were deeper," Cheryl Ann Weiss said. "We would see little marks, see little bruises and say, 'Aimee, how'd you get that?' and she'd say, 'I don't know.' But now, looking back . . ."
Her parents also learned that Weiss had been pregnant earlier, but miscarried, Cheryl Ann Weiss said. The couple broke up, but briefly reconciled and Aimee Weiss got pregnant again during that fateful reunion, she said.
Weiss told her stepmother she didn't know she was pregnant the second time until she was about five months along. During the few talks they have had at the women's detention center in Pompano Beach, Weiss has offered only brief explanations of the night in March when she delivered the baby while the rest of her family slept.
"She never really went into what I would call labor," Cheryl Ann Weiss said. "All night she felt kind of crampy but thought she had to go to the bathroom. She never knew until that baby started to come out that she was in labor."
Because she is big, insecure and her weight fluctuates, no one ever dared to ask whether she was pregnant, Cheryl Ann Weiss said. Neither of Aimee Weiss' biological parents would comment for this story.
Police say Aimee Weiss strangled the boy by wrapping underwear and plastic bags around his neck before stuffing him in her book bag and tossing it in a canal. When the book bag floated, she took a weight from her father's house and stuffed it in the bag to sink it, police say.
Her family refuses to believe she killed the boy and said she told them she thought he was already dead.
"I no more believe she murdered a baby than the man in the moon," said Hartman, her stepfather. "She's really aghast at the idea that people think she murdered him."
Scared and frantic, Wilmene Florestal said she wanted to get rid of her baby, not hurt him.
A lonely young woman who could name only one friend when questioned by police, Florestal didn't need to hide her pregnancy. A naturally heavy girl, she never knew she was carrying a baby, according to a lie detector test she passed.
A mediocre student who nevertheless promised her father she would become a doctor, Florestal suffered the taunts of other students about her weight and a bad leg. One teacher said she frequently sat through math class twice rather than go to chorus, where other students teased her.
Florestal was 15 in February when she started feeling stomach cramps and asked her father to run to the pharmacy. Before he returned a half-hour later, she delivered a boy in the small house's single bathroom. Hurrying to get rid of the baby, she grabbed a trash bag, punched breathing holes in it, pulled the baby out of the toilet and dropped the package over her backyard fence.
Within an hour, a neighbor had discovered the baby, who suffered some minor injuries from the fall, and called police. Police traced blood drops to Florestal's back door and into her bedroom. The baby is now in foster care.
After her arrest—she has since been charged with attempted second-degree murder—she gave an interview from her hospital bed and awkwardly tried to explain what had just happened.
"I wanted to keep him but I don't know what I'm gonna tell my parents 'cause I didn't know I was pregnant," she said. "I was kind of sad and empty, you know. . . . I just laid down on the couch in the living room."
Both girls exhibited the kind of fear that drives young mothers to act irrationally, said University of California Professor Lynn Ponton, a psychiatrist who has studied the phenomenon for 25 years.
"On one level they know they're pregnant and gaining weight and they hide it, but in their mind they don't think they are," Ponton said. "It's very common with girls who throw away their babies. When the babies come, and I've been called by many, many high schools where girls throw them away in the bathroom, what you see is the girl is shocked with the baby suddenly in front of her. . . . Many times they don't want to kill their baby, they just don't acknowledge it's a baby. They're disassociating at the time of delivery, so they're like, 'Ahhh, what is this?'"
The number of abandoned babies in South Florida piqued Ponton's interest because she thinks it proves some of her theories true: an increasingly conservative state urging abstinence and opposing abortion leaves teen mothers with the idea they have no choice.
Ponton is joined in her frustration by local education and health workers.
Education is "abstinence-based but the reality is kids are getting pregnant and they don't have the skills to say no," said Anne Hedges, director of the School Health Program for the Palm Beach County Health Care District, which oversees school nurses.
Nurses see between 60 and 100 students each day, in addition to administering medicine to another five dozen students, Hedges said. Last year, high school students made nearly 11,000 trips to school nurses for gynecological reasons. Middle school students made nearly 4,500 visits, according to district reports. But intercepting pregnant teens is not something they can do alone, she said.
Many other groups exist to help women struggling with pregnancies—Planned Parenthood of the Palm Beaches and Treasure Coast, the Maternal Child and Family Alliance, the Children's Services Council—but reaching women, particularly teens hiding pregnancies or in denial, is difficult at best.
"If you're in denial, you're in denial," Hedges said.
Realizing the futility of the situation, lawmakers last year created the Safe Harbor law to allow mothers to leave newborns at hospitals or fire stations, no questions asked. But so far the law has proven entirely ineffective. No babies have been dropped off in Palm Beach County.
"The reason it's going to fail is it really kind of violates all the dynamics of adolescence," said Larry Siegel, a clinical sexologist and program specialist for teen pregnancy and HIV prevention at the Children's Services Council. "In a sense, we force these girls by not giving them information and not being open about sex. We drive them underground. It's absurd to think the reason these girls are abandoning their babies is because they don't have a place to drop them off."
And it contradicts laws already on the books. A 1996 law requires police to investigate every birth by a girl 16 or younger and prosecute the fathers who are older than 21. Every month, the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office receives a list of names, which it passes along to police to investigate. Girls must provide the names of fathers under the law. So far, only three cases have developed but were resolved without prosecution, said state attorney spokesman Mike Edmondson.
"If you're terminating parental rights, there has to be a hearing, the parents have to be notified," said Johnson, of the Child Welfare League. "In cases where the child is adopted, they're supposed to do a search for the missing parents, including the father. How do you keep in compliance with all those laws already in existence, and at the same time here is a new law saying don't ask any questions?"
The law has yet to be tested. And in response to criticism that no one knew about it, lawmakers passed a second bill setting aside money to pay for publicity.
In Indian River County, the discovery of a newborn girl wrapped in a frayed blue towel in February captured the hearts of investigators and the community. Left with no leads, the sheriff's office made a commercial to appeal for help. Local health experts then enlisted Capt. Mary Hogan, the chief investigator, to appear in a commercial promoting the Safe Harbor law.
Citizens volunteered to organize a funeral and started collecting money to further advertise the law. Last week, the baby, named Hope by dispatchers, was buried in a dress donated by a local mom and laid to rest in the very far corner of Crestlawn cemetery under a wreath of pink carnations.
Baby Hope, along with Weiss' son, were two of four dead infants discovered since February. On April 18, workers at a Key Biscayne condominium discovered a 10-pound, 21-inch newborn in a trash bin. The baby died of blunt trauma. Investigators say they have no leads. The baby found at the Miami bus stop died of head injuries consistent with a baby shaken to death, investigators concluded. They could not tell whether the baby was alive when the mother tucked it and her note in the duffle bag.
"There's a very low success rate on solvability," Hogan said of the cases. Though not for lack of trying. "One of the news crews doing live coverage said it looks like you're taking a personal interest and I said it is personal. Most of us have children of our own. And there is nothing that pulls on the heart like climbing down into the water and pulling out a baby. It's awful. This is a perfectly formed child with some decomposition. It's like holding an 8-pound baby in your arms."
Babies found last year fared better. Baby Manny headlined newspapers for days after he was found in a Manalapan shopping center in February 2000 and police searched door to door for his mother. Another infant, Adam, was found in a Fort Pierce mobile home park in April 2000 and named for the paramedic who rescued him. Both were placed for adoption by the state.
Their mothers have never been found.
