A spate of abandoned babies unsettles Texas but prompts little action…

In one of those bags, a baby had been crying. Now, only silence.

“They didn’t want to touch it,” Pequet says. “It was very still.”

A quarter century ago, prompted by a spate of abandoned babies in Houston, this state became the first in the country to pass a safe haven law allowing parents to relinquish newborns at designated places — without questions or risk of prosecution. Yet “Baby Moses” surrenders remain rare in Texas, and another series of abandoned infants since spring in the Houston area has prompted much soul-searching.

In June, a baby boy was left next to a clothing donation bin on the city’s southeast side and a baby girl in some bushes in Katy, a western suburb. Both were saved.

By August, two other babies had been found: in an industrial ditch in north Houston and in a trash truck’s compactor in a far northwest neighborhood. Both were dead.

“There apparently has been … a little bit of an epidemic on this,” a Harris County sheriff’s official noted during a media briefing near the ditch where the infant girl’s partially clothed body was discovered in August by a landscaping crew.

Statewide, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, at least 18 babies have been abandoned this year. The latest occurred just before Christmas at a Whataburger in San Antonio. A decade ago, the number was seven.

End of carousel

Whether there’s a pattern or common link in these tragedies is not clear. But they’re happening in a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans — with no exceptions for rape or incest — and one of the highest birth rates.

Critics argue that’s no coincidence. Texas is ranked next to last for women’s health and reproductive care, according to the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which supports independent research on such issues. And with legislators having repeatedly cut funding for that care, the percentage of women without health insurance is higher here than in any other state. This year, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered Texas public hospitals to track the cost of treating immigrants who are in the country illegally, potentially deterring women from seeking care for fear of being turned over to authorities.

“All of these intersectional things could be leading to this,” said Blake Rocap, a lawyer with the Sissy Farenthold Reproductive Justice Defense Project at the University of Texas at Austin. The chilling effect of the near-total abortion ban, he believes, is compounded by “abysmal” access to prenatal care, “particularly for people without private insurance, particularly for people without immigration status.”

And for all the angst every time a newborn is found, Republican leaders who control state government have long declined to fund an awareness campaign so that new mothers know where to turn should they decide that they cannot keep their baby.

In his 2½ years as a Houston firefighter and paramedic, Pequet has responded to several abandoned baby calls. Each child had been left in a dumpster. None survived.

He expected another grim outcome as he knelt on the ground that July afternoon in the apartment complex parking lot, a scene filmed by a resident on a cellphone.

The dark-haired newborn was still covered in the waxy substance that had protected him in the womb, and his umbilical cord was still attached. Pequet gently lifted him out of the trash bag and swaddled him in a small blanket another firefighter had ready. The moment felt intense. Pequet wondered whether the woman responsible would ever be located.

“We were probably the first people to hold the baby with any kind of good intentions,” he said later.

The infant, whom officials named Gabriel after the archangel protector, would live.

Gabriel’s mother, a Guatemalan migrant teen named Everilda Cux-Ajtzalam, was arrested a few days after his rescue.

How that came to be widened the circle of those affected by his abandonment — from first responders like 25-year-old Pequet and neighbors like Faustina Salazar to investigators and prosecutors, including Assistant District Attorney Steven Belt, who initially handled the case against Cux-Ajtzalam as she was charged with felony child abandonment.

As it turned out, the baby’s delivery and the immediate aftermath were captured by a parking lot security camera. While the prosecutor declined to share the video, citing the ongoing case, he described what’s on it:

Cux-Ajtzalam first appears coming out of a taco truck parked in front of the brick apartment complex.

“Traffic’s going by,” Belt says. “At one point, you can see people walking by.”

The food truck, which Cux-Ajtzalam was running solo for the owner, blocks any street view as she kneels and gives birth next to the vehicle. “It was amazing no one heard her screams,” he says, before reconsidering since the video has no sound. “Maybe she wasn’t screaming.”

Cux-Ajtzalam then takes trash bags to pick up the newborn without ever touching him. “She doesn’t even look at the child while it’s laying on the ground. Literally scoops it,” Belt says. She pours water from a jug onto the parking lot, washing away the afterbirth. Then she picks up the bags, places them in a small trash can and “goes to the dumpster and drops it there.”

Salazar came by on her way back from taking her wash to the community laundry room. “I walked about 10 steps when I heard the baby,” she recounted recently in Spanish. She saw Cux-Ajtzalam, whom she didn’t know, standing in front of the dumpster and asked if she heard the crying.

Yes, the young woman replied, without seeming alarmed. Salazar began to panic — “Where is it? Maybe it’s in the trash!” she remembers saying — and told Cux-Ajtzalam to get the complex’s manager. When she instead walked away, Salazar called her son in her apartment. He phoned 911 and rushed out to help.

They were the first to see the baby, Salazar untying the bag so he could breathe: “He put his hand out, like ‘thanks.’ I will never forget it.” The 72-year-old house cleaner would become a critical link for police, whom body-camera footage shows getting to the scene moments later. After an ambulance left with the newborn, Salazar told a detective about the young woman she had seen at the dumpster.

Gabriel soon was placed with local foster parents. The prosecutor went to visit him, and he marveled at his tiny head, the soft spot where his skull was still forming, his hands with “the longest little fingers” that always seemed to work their way out of his wrap.

The couple gave Belt a photo that he put on his desk at work: Gabriel in a yellow-striped onesie, hair a fluffy black helmet, mouth a tiny pink bow. The caption: “Treasured beyond measure.”

Police have identified a parent in four of the six abandoned-baby cases in the Houston area this year, though only one other individual had been charged as of mid-December. In the other cases, one autopsy was inconclusive and the second remained pending, so authorities still didn’t know whether either child was born alive.

No matter the circumstances, desperation is a common thread.

The 28-year-old woman who gave birth next to the clothing donation bin in late June had been living at a homeless camp around the corner, a witness said; court records show a lengthy criminal record that includes arrests for assault, prostitution and drug possession.

And the 22-year-old woman whose newborn ended up in the garbage truck’s compactor told investigators she had passed out while showering, then awakened to find she had delivered. When she realized the infant was dead, she said, she panicked and put the body in the trash. A trash crew making its rounds through a neighborhood discovered the body.

“At first, the sanitation guy thought it was a doll. He goes over and touches it and realizes it was a real baby,” said Lt. Mike Santos, a veteran sheriff’s homicide investigator. “When we got there, it’s still in the trash truck. It was horrible.”

Even with a record $32.7 billion budget surplus, state lawmakers here have not committed any money to raise awareness in hopes of preventing babies from being abandoned. Instead, they allocated $165 million this fiscal year to programs offering alternatives to abortion, including crisis pregnancy centers that claim to provide women unbiased guidance but have been accused of deceptive practices. The appropriation included at least $2 million for an initiative promoting adoption, with targeted messages that detractors consider misleading.

The South Texas Republican who authored the safe haven law doesn’t take issue with those decisions. “The problem is, if you do state funding, then you’re tied to it,” Rep. Geanie Morrison explained recently when asked about an awareness campaign. “Better to have it be a local issue.”

By contrast, Nebraska recently updated its safe haven law to add a hotline and $75,000 for educational measures this year and next. Virginia has allocated $50,000 annually since 2022 for a safe haven website, billboards, public service announcements, a bilingual state hotline and a training program for providers. Illinois requires public schools to teach students about its safe haven law and provides free curriculum, posters and brochures.

Leah Kipley, assistant director of the National Safe Haven Alliance, met with Texas legislators last year to advocate for an awareness campaign like ones she said helped reduce abandonments in other states. The Arizona-based nonprofit reached out again after the recent spike in Houston-area cases.

“We’re all just reeling at the tragedies in Houston and hoping we can make some meaningful changes to prevent this,” Kipley said. “It just shows you the lack of awareness in vulnerable communities, like the undocumented. This is a law that we have that protects human life, and this needs to be shared. If it’s not shared, how will they know there’s help?”

Last year, Texas joined several other states passing laws that allow communities to install Safe Haven Baby Boxes. The climate-controlled, padded drawers are installed in fire stations’ exterior walls at a cost that can approach $20,000. They allow someone to leave a baby safely and anonymously, with a silent alarm alerting first responders. This year, residents raised money to buy boxes in Abilene and Lubbock, communities in deep-red West Texas deemed by local ordinance to be “sanctuary cities for the unborn.”

Officials in The Woodlands, a wealthy suburb of Houston, planned to install a box before year’s end in response to what the township board director calls an “explosion of abandonments.” Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, an outspoken opponent of abortion, believes the state should also fund a hotline and an awareness campaign in English and Spanish.

“Women don’t know what to do,” she said. “We have to educate, to give them more choices, to give them a chance to provide a loving home for their child.”

Conservative lawmakers are divided about the boxes’ utility. Rep. Morrison said she opposes them because the people lobbying hardest for them run the companies that stand to profit.

Two days after Lubbock blessed its baby box at Fire Station 9, a passerby found a newborn in a dumpster on the other side of the city.

For weeks after baby Gabriel was abandoned, the prosecutor handling his mother’s case would look at his photo and think, “I will make sure that child is safe and that justice is done.”

Yet it was hard to figure what justice required for Cux-Ajtzalam, who entered this country illegally and faces deportation after the resolution of the felony charge.

Belt is a military veteran and the father of five daughters and one son. He grew up Mormon but left the church because of its views on LGBTQ rights. During the first Trump administration, he spent a year as a federal prosecutor on the Texas border, prosecuting migrants separated from their children.

The experience was so harrowing, he almost quit. Instead, he returned to Houston and began focusing on child abuse. In pursuing a case against Gabriel’s mother, he first sympathized with her desperate circumstances, then decided that she had to be held accountable.

“I cannot sit here as a prosecutor in my community and not try to do something to deter this from happening,” Belt said this past fall. “It’s hard to know if our actions have an effect. But I’ll be damned if I can’t stop people from disregarding the life of a child.”

Salazar, the neighbor who first heard Gabriel’s cries by the dumpster, has a different perspective. Decades ago, she crossed into Texas from Mexico. She understands what it’s like to live in fear of authorities.

Not that she excuses Cux-Ajtzalam’s actions. “She lacked information,” Salazar speculates. “She didn’t know what to do.”

Behind a glass partition at the county jail, legs shackled, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, the person at the center of all this looked far younger than her 18 years. During two conversations with The Washington Post in August and September, Cux-Ajtzalam talked about her life before and after she came to the United States.

The before was growing up in the mountains of rural Guatemala, where her family spoke the Indigenous language Quiché, her father farmed, and she went to school only until she was 12. The after was once she followed an older brother to Houston, where she stayed with relatives, found the job in the taco truck and sent money home to her family.

Cux-Ajtzalam spoke in Spanish, saying she didn’t know English. There were other things she also said she didn’t know, having never had any sex education. It wasn’t until seven months after she claims a relative entered her room one night and raped her that she realized she was pregnant, she said.

“I never told anyone anything. I was ashamed,” she said, crying. (The man denied wrongdoing during an interview with The Post. He has not been charged.)

As for seeking care, Cux-Ajtzalam didn’t think she could chance it. She said she had heard about Texas officials deporting undocumented immigrants: “I was afraid to go to a clinic.”

She had no idea what she would do when she went into labor, much less after the baby was born. She knew nothing about a safe haven law.

“It’s not the baby’s fault,” she said.

Houston attorney Fitzgerald Eze, whom Cux-Ajtzalam’s boyfriend hired this fall to represent her, said prosecutors appeared open to hearing details of her story “that contextualize this event and help to counter the tendency to see Everilda as a heartless monster.”

He has met with her several times and says she “often struggles to remember the details of the traumatic event that led to her arrest.” According to Eze, there is evidence she was unaware the baby was alive at birth. He would not address prosecutors’ account of the apartment complex security video.

“She wants to be in [his] life,” Eze said. “She’s a first-time mother and, notwithstanding the circumstances that led to her pregnancy and subsequent arrest, Everilda loves her son.”

Justice here would be forgiveness, the lawyer believes — and a reunion. Cux-Ajtzalam has now named her son Nathaniel. “I don’t want them to be apart too long,” he said.

His client remains jailed as her case progresses. Her next court hearing is scheduled for late January; she has not yet entered a plea. If convicted, she could face up to 20 years in prison.

Maybe that will be doing right by baby Gabriel, the prosecutor thinks. He wishes Texas would expand health care for women, especially the most vulnerable. But that’s beyond his control. In a state where policies ban, exclude and threaten, Belt admits he is far from sure about what he can do to keep the next troubled young woman from abandoning her newborn.

“There’s got to be a better way,” he said. “It cannot be so callous as putting a baby in a trash bag. It just can’t.”

Illustrations by Hirotoshi Iwasaki for The Washington Post.