Do-Gooders Win Lottery Jackpot

When Debi and Steve Cifelli heard they'd won California's $27 million lottery jackpot, their first reaction was what you might expect.

"I called Debi and said, 'Sweetheart, our lives are about to change," said Steve.

"We've only been married four months and I said, 'If he's kidding me he's in so much trouble,'" said Debi. "And he said, 'No, honey, it's true.'"

All too often, the ring of Debi Faris-Cifelli's cell phone means there is another abandoned newborn at the morgue, another forsaken child for her to name and bury in a shoebox-size coffin under a white cross in the California desert.

"Maybe it's the children saying, 'Thank you' for taking care of them when nobody else would," Faris-Cifelli said, bubbling with laughter. "It's a gift and one for which we feel an awesome responsibility."

It's what they did next that sets the Cifellis apart.

"That's a lot of money to be responsible for. We want to be really good stewards of that money. We feel like it's a gift," said Debi.

"And the first thing we thought of was a scholarship fund," said Steve.

People who know them weren't surprised they'd put others first — They always have, reports CBS News Correspondent Bill Whitaker. Steve is a dedicated high school guidance counselor. Debi established the Garden of Angels Cemetery near Palm Springs where abandoned babies are laid to rest. She was the driving force behind California's 2001 Safe Haven Law allowing desperate mothers to leave newborns at safe locations without fear of prosecution. It's now law in 46 states.

The money could not come at a better time for Faris-Cifelli and the tiny cemetery in the town of Calimesa where she has buried dozens of tiny children whose mothers didn't hear — or didn't care — about California's safe-haven law.

Faris-Cifelli helped win passage of the law and has made it her life's work to spread the word that scared and confused parents should drop their newborns at firehouses and hospitals — not in trash cans and alleys. She lobbies in states without such laws, talks to teens and police and has attended 12 trials of mothers accused of abandoning their infants. She also lays the dead to rest.

Faris-Cifelli, 49, does all that with just a three-person staff and $172,000 annual budget covered by donations, grants, car washes and bake sales.

Now the couple will receive an after-tax lump sum of nearly $9 million. Some of the winnings will go to the couple's seven children, most to her crusade.

It was only the third time she and her husband had played the lottery.

"We have 70 babies who rest in the Garden of Angels and for each one of those children we want to start a scholarship in their name," said Faris-Cifelli.

For each baby, there will be a scholarship for one young woman and one young man.

"That means that we will be able to help 140 people a year," she said.

"If the little kids up there are dancing in heaven and are happy for us, then that's the way it should be," Steve Cifelli said. "They're saying, 'We want you to do more,' and we're going to do it."

Since the safe-haven law went into effect four years ago, only 67 babies have been safely surrendered in California. Since the law was enacted, Faris-Cifelli has buried fewer babies each year — though no one knows how many have died.

"This law does work, but it works when there is some kind of campaign going along with it," Faris-Cifelli said. "It just hurts me that we don't talk about it until there's a baby who's lost its life."

The state budgets about $1.5 million for advertising — not enough to buy even one statewide TV spot, according to Andrew Roth, spokesman for the California Department of Social Services.

Attempts to track the law's track record have been unsuccessful because the agency can't tally information from coroners in 58 counties who use vastly different methods to record data, Roth said. The state plans to give oversight of the law to counties in March.

Faris-Cifelli, calm and measured even after her lotto win, fears that will mean a less effective law.

When someone finds a dead baby in a three-county area around Los Angeles, the morgue knows to call Faris-Cifelli. She goes into the autopsy room alone, where she wraps each infant in a homemade quilt, cradles it and prays over it. She gives each baby a first name that is engraved on the cross. At the gravesite, she releases dozens of doves under the shade of a mulberry tree.

Babies whose remains go unclaimed are cremated, and their ashes placed in a small cardboard box and saved for three years before being put in an unmarked grave with other John and Jane Does.

Karen Moan of Victorville, Calif., who adopted one of the first babies surrendered under the safe-haven law — now a curly haired 3-year-old named Michael — sees more than coincidence in her friend's good fortune.

"Everybody wants to win the lottery, but she truly deserves to win," Moan said. "It seems like it was meant to be."

"I think that God has chosen to reward her," Garden of Angels visitor Lanida Treas told CBS News.