Sanpete searching landfill for baby's body

MAYFIELD, Sanpete County — Searchers began digging through piles upon piles of rubbish at the White Hills Landfill this week in hopes of finding the remains of an infant they believe was dumped there.

But the realities faced by authorities in the task ahead of them made Sanpete County sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Greg Peterson loath to sound too hopeful.

"It's a needle in a haystack," Peterson said Monday, the same day sheriff's deputies began going through the garbage.

It's the same metaphor Peterson has used time and time again for nearly two weeks, since officials began considering how best to go about searching for the infant.

About three weeks ago, a teenage girl gave birth at home to a baby she said had been stillborn. Alone and apparently frightened, the girl put the baby in a Dumpster with garbage that eventually went to the county landfill.

Authorities were notified of the situation on April 24. By then, so much time had passed that the place where the baby may have been dumped had been covered by dirt and more trash.

Peterson laid out the difficulty of the task.

"They have a huge area there," he said. "It's over a football field long."

And there isn't much manpower the sheriff's office can spare to search that entire area.

"There's only a couple of (officers) there," Peterson said. "We don't have huge resources."

Landfill workers have been able to lend some help, he said.

"The people there at the dump have pinpointed an area where they thought there was a high probability of where the baby may be from the time the garbage would have been dumped," Peterson said.

Officers are focusing on that high-priority area, using a backhoe to dig out trash that officers then sift through. On Tuesday, officers said they were digging down through about 10 feet of trash but could go down as far as 24 feet.

Investigators are using scraps of thrown-away newspapers and address labels in the trash heap to help them determine when and where the trash was dumped.

As of earlier this week, they had not found any trash from the area where the baby was born and thrown away. Officials have not publicly disclosed that locale.

Peterson said there's no timeline for how long the search will last. The search's duration and extent will be determined by what is discovered in the search of the initial area, he said.

"They're going to get an idea of what they're looking at and if there's really any chance of recovering the body," Peterson said. "If the compaction isn't too bad, they'll continue looking."

E-mail: john@sanpetemessenger.com