HOUSTON — The call came in on the fire truck’s radio on a blazing hot summer afternoon: “Baby in a dumpster.”

“It didn’t specify alive or dead,” Patrick Pequet remembers.

He and fellow firefighters arrived within minutes, pulling into the rear parking lot of an apartment complex in the southwest quadrant of this sprawling city. Police were already there, as were the several residents who had frantically summoned them, standing near a blue dumpster crowded by discarded boxes, scattered trash and garbage bags.