"Woman Who Gives Abandoned Newborns a Decent Burial Wins $27 Million JackpotLink
By Gillian Flaccus
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) - All too often, the ring of Debi Faris-Cifelli's cell phone means there is another abandoned newborn at the morgue, another forsaken child for her to name and bury in a shoebox-size coffin under a white cross in the California desert.
Last week, though, Faris-Cifelli - who has had to rely on donations, grants and fund-raisers to give babies a decent burial - got a very different call.
She had won the California lottery.
The jackpot: $27 million.
"Maybe it's the children saying, 'Thank you' for taking care of them when nobody else would," Faris-Cifelli said, bubbling with laughter. "It's a gift and one for which we feel an awesome responsibility."
The money could not come at a better time for Faris-Cifelli and her Garden of Angels, the tiny cemetery in the town of Calimesa where she has buried dozens of tiny children whose mothers didn't hear - or didn't care - about California's safe-haven law.
Under the 2001 law, parents have three days to abandon infants without fear of prosecution. California is one of 46 states with such a law.
Faris-Cifelli helped win passage of the law and has made it her life's work to spread the word that scared and confused parents should drop their newborns at firehouses and hospitals - not in trash cans and alleys. She lobbies in states without such laws, talks to teens and police and has attended 12 trials of mothers accused of abandoning their infants. She also lays the dead to rest.
Faris-Cifelli, 49, does all that with just a three-person staff and $172,000 annual budget covered by donations, grants, car washes and bake sales.
Now the deeply religious mother and her high school counselor husband, Steve, will receive an after-tax lump sum of nearly $9 million. Some of the winnings will go to the couple's seven children, most to her crusade.
It was only the third time she and her husband had played the lottery. "
But yes, it is a neat story, other than the government theft.
We have a current situation with a newborn who was taken into foster care because mom came into the hospital on drugs when she delivered and the baby tested positive for drugs. I think this was on Friday. Now, the mom and her boyfriend have taken off and left the state with the other 2 kids, for all practical purposes, abandoning the baby. Very sad, but then, if they doesn't show back up in fairly short order and it is determined to be abandonment, the case can be fast-tracked, their rights terminated and the baby can be put up for adoption, so it might actually be the best thing that can happen from the baby's perspective.