Once Kidnaped by Father for Treatment in Mexico : Laetrile Girl, 5, Dies After Car Accident

A 5-year-old girl whose father once snatched her from a Los Angeles hospital and spirited her off to Mexico for unorthodox leukemia treatments has died after a traffic accident, authorities said today.

Amanda Joy Accardi died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Saturday following a traffic accident on the Golden State Freeway, said Bill Gold, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

No cause of death will be determined until the results of several tissue studies are known, he said.

When Amanda was 2, she was under treatment for leukemia at Children’s Hospital.

In July, 1981, her father, Michael Accardi, crept into her hospital room, detached an intravenous needle, lifted the child from her bed and sped away from the hospital, authorities said. He headed for Centro Medico Del Mar in Tijuana for chemotherapy and Laetrile treatments.

‘Lab Rat’

He claimed then that doctors at Children’s wanted to use his daughter as a “lab rat without my permission and with a court order.”

In 1979, just a few days after Amanda was born, Accardi took her from an incubator in the same hospital so she would not have to undergo a blood transfusion. She was suffering from jaundice at the time.

Relatives, however, persuaded the girl’s parents to return her to the hospital at that time.

After undergoing Laetrile treatments in Tijuana in 1981, the girl’s condition went into remission, according to that center’s director, Dr. Ernesto Contreras Sr.

That was confirmed, under court order, by doctors at UC San Diego.

Child endangerment charges against Amanda’s parents were not pursued, although San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli had agreed to defend them.

But the Accardis then disappeared and no one heard from them again until December, 1982, when Cedars-Sinai confirmed that doctors there had been treating Amanda since August of that year.