A compassionate group of police officers has played an integral part in a funeral held for a baby who was found discarded on the side of the road.
The premature infant, born at just 20-weeks, was found by a passerby early Morning in Brooklyn, across the street from a park and a junior high school, according to police.
“It’s crazy. It’s unbelievable. Shocking and disheartening,” a witness, Veronica Sexton, told the New York Post. “I came in and told my mother, there is a bag with bloody clothes, I’m gonna call the cops, it doesn’t look right. She came outside to look at it and she said to just leave it.”
Local resident Orlando Reid added that he “wished whoever the woman that did it, did it differently.”
“Hopefully, the person whose child it is gets help,” he said.
Dignity and respect
Accompanied by an NYPD bagpipe player, a group of officers acted as pallbearers to escort the infant casket into the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood on Saturday.
The funeral was organized by pro-life center “the Life Center of New York,” with many Catholic parishioners attending the service. The organization posthumously named the baby girl “Monica.”
“We were moved to do something for this baby,” the executive director of the Life Center explained to News 12 Brooklyn. “We called the police department and asked them if they could assist us and accompany us. And the church so generously said they would do a mass for us.”
He added: “We want to show that there are people out here that care for life and respect life. That’s basically what we want to do. We want to give her the dignity that she should have in death, that she didn’t have.”
“This baby had nobody, but she has us.. that’s what we do,” one of the 300 attendees told the outlet.
The burial took place at Resurrection Cemetery on Staten Island, in an area reserved for abandoned remains, according to the Washington Times.
“Please remember to pray for Baby Monica’s mother who, like Baby Monica and countless others, is a victim of the culture of death that has darkened our city, state and nation,” the Life Center wrote in a statement on its website.