Former St. Louis police officer reunited with baby he rescued in 1963

ST. LOUIS -- Toni DiPina has been trying to solve the mystery of her unknown family since she was abandoned as a baby.

The reality is DiPina, at 51, still has no clue where she came from. She does not know why one or both of her parents abandoned her at 9 months on May 26, 1963, on a vacant lot in St. Louis. No one has ever come forward. Not then and not in 2008 when the Post-Dispatch first wrote extensively about her.

For decades, the only details she had from a day she was too young to remember came from a typewritten police report based on details provided by St. Louis police officer George Leuckel. After the baby was discovered by two boys around 5:30 p.m., Leuckel was called to the lot off Bell Avenue, an ailing area that used to be the city's most exclusive neighborhood, Vandeventer Place.

He found a baby in a blue-checked dress with a pink sweater and cap sitting on a pink blanket amid weeds and rusting cars and appliances dumped on the lot.

The report chronicled the basics: The baby seemed well cared for. There were no witnesses. No one knew the child. Doctors at City Hospital No. 2 estimated her age at 9 months. Officers canvassed the neighborhood but found no leads. Leuckel and a city social worker drove the child to an emergency foster home on Hodiamont Avenue on the western edge of the city.

But what Leuckel's report did not convey was the connection forged that day between a white man in his 20s who had grown up in Catholic orphanages, and a black baby also destined to walk the world as an orphan.

This month, some 50 years after they first locked eyes on the lot, the two reunited for the first time.

If things had been different, if race didn't matter, Leuckel and his wife might have adopted DiPina. Instead, she learned, Leuckel prayed for her. Again and again.

Here is George Leuckel's memory of the day he found the baby -- the details that did not make it into the official reports:

He parked his cruiser in front of the sole house on Bell Avenue. He walked up a circular drive that used to be lined with mansions. It was eerily quiet. The baby was in a tiny clearing, sitting upright on the blanket. He knew immediately by the way she was dressed she had been cared for.

Leuckel looked around and found no one. Only weeds, woods and debris. He had a creepy sensation that someone was hiding and watching him to make sure the baby was found.

The baby stared quietly at Leuckel. She did not cry.

At the city hospital where he took her to be evaluated, the baby clutched him and would not let Leuckel go when a nurse approached. At the police station, he typed reports with the girl in one arm, until his sergeant ordered him to put her down.

Leuckel and his three sisters had grown up in St. Louis Catholic orphanages after their parents divorced and his mother became destitute. He knew what it was like to grow up without parents.

Leuckel said he floated the possibility of adopting the child. He and his wife, Barbara, already had three daughters, and another on the way. But the real issue wasn't money or living space. It was 1963 in deeply segregated St. Louis.

"The thought had crossed my mind to take her home, but there was no way you could do that back then."

Leuckel didn't know the baby's name, nor the name she was given in foster care, Antoinette Baker. But his memory of her never faded.

Some 25 years later at a charity auction, Leuckel spotted a print of a girl walking on a trail flanked by towering trees and populated by gazing forest animals. A translucent angel in a flowing dress, standing nearly as tall as the trees, walked just behind the girl. The angel's arms were outstretched to guide the girl forward. The print was $75.

By then, the Leuckels had five daughters. One of them -- named, by coincidence, Toni -- was born with developmental disabilities and required constant care. Leuckel had taken early retirement in 1982 to care for his grown daughter full time. The family could not afford a $75 painting. But he told his wife it reassured him that the baby he found on the lot had a guardian angel, so they bought it.

For the next 20 years he whispered a prayer each time he passed the print hanging in his home. Thousands of prayers repeated for that baby.

One of the few positive influences in DiPina's early life was reading Maya Angelou -- her literary hero, whom she resembles. There was also church and a Sunday school teacher who took her to cultural events that gave her a break from abusive foster homes. After she aged out of the system in the early 1980s, she was at times homeless.

But she had odd strokes of luck. In 1987, for example, she answered a classified ad for a nanny for five boys in central Massachusetts. She applied and prayed. The family hired her. They paid her airfare to Boston and gave her use of a red Jeep and free time to take college classes. That opened the door to a new life in New England: a college degree, a career, family and the decision to become a pastor.

In 2008, while she was finishing seminary near Boston, DiPina read a Post-Dispatch story about a newborn boy abandoned and found alive in grass clippings in a Dumpster in the city's West End. As in DiPina's case, no relatives came forward. The city family court declared the child abandoned, and he was placed in foster care. DiPina told her story to a reporter as a way to urge the baby's relatives to claim him. She wanted the child to know his ancestry, the knowledge she yearned for herself.

The Post-Dispatch chronicled DiPina's graduation from seminary.

Before the ceremony, DiPina prayed with her family for the abandoned baby, and for his mother to come forward.

"Give her the strength to seek help, Lord. She needs help, and you know it," began the story in the Post-Dispatch.

While researching that story, a reporter learned that Leuckel was living near St. Louis and called him. When he heard the baby he found more than 40 years ago was alive and graduating seminary in Boston, he knew his prayers had been answered.

The Post-Dispatch story on DiPina ran in June 2008. No blood relatives came forward. Nor did any relatives claim the newborn abandoned in the West End.

DiPina went on with life in Massachusetts. The baby she prayed for was soon adopted by a local family. He is now in elementary school.

DiPina is now a grandmother. She wrote a documentary on Sarah Collins Rudolph, the lone survivor of the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. She is an ordained minister with United Church of Christ and leads a congregation in Northbridge, Mass.

Last year, she decided to try again to solve the mystery of her past. She shared her story on Facebook. She consulted a St. Louis private detective. She tracked down one of the boys who found her on the lot; he now lives in California. She tried to run her DNA through state and federal crime computer records to find a match but was told it couldn't be done.

And she made her first call to the Leuckels, who immediately welcomed a visit.

The reunion happened Jan. 3 in the Leuckels' Oakville condominium during a pouring rainstorm. DiPina sat with Leuckel, now 79, his wife, Barbara and their daughter Toni, near the print of the guardian angel hanging in the dining room.

Leuckel and DiPina happily recounted their lives. Leuckel recalled the details of finding DiPina: her checked dress, the blanket, the weeds and eerie silence, the feeling of being watched, the bond -- like a father telling a daughter the story about the day she was born.

Then Leuckel told her about the prayers he whispered for her to the angel in the framed print. DiPina smiled and said she always knew she had a guardian angel.

"You know, George, you're like the oldest person who knows me," she said.

In the early 1980s, the Leuckels had a family portrait taken that still hangs in their living room. It shows the proud parents surrounded by their daughters, then ages 8 to 24. At the time, the family was living in Florissant. DiPina was in or likely on her way to Massachusetts.

"Well, if it had been in different times," Leuckel told her, "You might have been in that picture."

While in St. Louis, DiPina had other people and places to visit from her childhood, some with good memories, some not. As she drove her rental car away into the rain, the mystery of her abandonment continued.

But she was certain of one true thing: All her life she had a guardian named George, who prayed to an angel to help guide her on her path.

Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com