Fresno ceremony honors four unclaimed babies with dignified burial

Four babies named Zoe, Mia Mae, Janice and Jun were laid to rest at Mountain View Cemetery in Fresno after the Fresno County Coroner’s Office released their remains when no family came forward to claim them. The burial service, held Saturday, April 19, gave each child a named place in a county cemetery instead of an unmarked grave.

The ceremony was organized by Garden of Innocence, a nonprofit that says its mission is to provide dignified burials for abandoned and unidentified children. At the service, small boxes representing the children were passed among attendees, a simple ritual that turned an overlooked county case into a public act of witness and care. In Fresno County, that last-resort path runs from the coroner’s office, which handles the remains after death investigation, to volunteers and clergy who arrange burial when no relatives step forward.

Garden of Innocence founder Elissa Davey has said the work began in 1998 after she learned about an unclaimed baby who would otherwise have been buried in an unmarked grave. The first Garden of Innocence burial was for Baby Adam on June 19, 1999, and the organization now says it has held services for more than 250 children nationwide, including ceremonies in California and Hawaii. In Fresno, the group says it holds burials twice a year.

The local work has grown into a long-running presence at Mountain View Cemetery on Belmont Avenue. The Fresno section of the Garden of Innocence was dedicated on Oct. 27, 2012, and the Diocese of Fresno said the group had laid more than 150 infant brothers and sisters to rest locally by April 28, 2025. The diocese also described that 2025 gathering as the largest on record, underscoring how often Fresno turns to this quiet ceremony as part of its public safety net for the most vulnerable dead.

The April burial showed how much of that safety net depends on coordination between public officials, church leaders and volunteers. When a baby is not claimed, the county cannot simply stop at identification or storage. Someone still has to arrange the grave, name the child and stand at the cemetery when the service begins. In Fresno, Garden of Innocence has become the institution that fills that gap.