Infant’s Body Discovered in Office Filing Cabinet

BUENA PARK — Workers at the sprawling Yamaha Corp. of America building made a grisly discovery Friday morning when the body of a full-term infant was found stashed in a locked filing cabinet, police said.

The infant had been wrapped in a towel and placed in a plastic bag along with a pair of women’s underwear and shorts, Buena Park Police Sgt. Lloyd Schwengel said. A coroner’s examination determined that the body had likely been in the cabinet for one or two weeks, Schwengel said.

An autopsy scheduled for today will seek to determine if the infant, described only as a female Caucasian, was born alive or dead. For now, police are assuming the infant was a live newborn and are treating the case as a homicide investigation, Schwengel said.

The body was found after employees at the electronics manufacturer complained in recent days about a putrid odor, according to senior vice president Roger Stange. Maintenance workers tracked the smell, unlocked the cabinet and found the plastic bag, Stange said.

“I don’t know a great deal more than that,” Stange said. “It’s just terrible.”

The Buena Park facility at 6660 Orangethorpe Ave. is the national headquarters for Yamaha Corp. of America, a subsidiary of Japan’s Yamaha Corp. The site is the hub for nationwide distribution of Yamaha electronics, Stange said.

The body was discovered in the offices of the consumer audio section, which oversees distribution of items such as home theater systems, stereo speakers and compact disc players, Stange said. The division accounts for about 40 of the plant’s more than 350 employees, he said.

Stange said he did not know which employees typically use the filing cabinet, nor did he know if it was routinely kept locked. Besides Yamaha employees, he said, the building is frequented by outside vendors, such as cleaning crews and food service workers.

An outside counseling program will assist employees in the office where the discovery was made, Strange said, and all those workers were sent home for the day following the 11 a.m. discovery.

“They were traumatized by the whole thing, as you can well imagine,” Stange said.