Officer Reunites with Infant Found in Dumpster in 1989

In 1989, Santa Ana police officer Michael Buelna, on duty in another investigation, heard murmuring inside a trash bin. He opened it and found a barely breathing newborn infant still attached to his umbilical cord.

Sunday, the officer and the once discarded Robin Barton met for the first time, twenty five years after Buelna picked him from the garbage and softly blew air into the newborn’s lungs. The infant was four hours old and weighed just over four pounds.

“He still had all the mucus and stuff, and all the trash and gravel was sticking to him,” Buelna remembers. “I tried to give him a tiny little bit of breath, and he reacted a little bit.”

Officer Buelna wanted the child, but an Orange County family moved in and adopted the child, naming him Robin Barton, reported SFGate.

Serena Fabiola Diaz, the nineteen-year old biological mother of Barton, was convicted shortly after her son was rescued for attempted murder and spent three years in jail. She moved to Mexico after serving her sentence. SFGate reported that she now wants to meet the child that she discarded in the dumpster and left to die over two decades ago.

Barton agreed to meet with Diaz, hoping that meeting his biological mother will bring closure. “I’m not angry or upset with her, and I forgive her because she was a young woman in a very compromising position,” he said.