Girl Whose Parents Risked Jail for Her Dies in Crash

Amanda Joy Accardi, the 5-year-old Glendale leukemia victim whose parents once risked jail in their battle to save her life, has died from injuries suffered in an automobile accident, investigators reported Thursday.

The child was being taken to the hospital for her regular chemotherapy session when her father’s car skidded off the Golden State Freeway and crashed.

Amanda and her parents, Michael and Katherine Accardi, became the key figures in a life-and-death abduction drama during the summer of 1981 when the distraught couple abducted the child and took her to Mexico for treatment at a controversial Tijuana hospital.

Despite threats of prosecution for child-endangering, they kept her in Tijuana’s Hospital del Mar, until the disease went into temporary remission.

They later brought her back to California, where she had been under periodic treatment for the blood disease ever since.

The father was at the wheel of the family’s 1968 Mustang last Friday when it skidded across the freeway, bounced into the air and plunged nose first off the roadway near Fletcher Drive in the Silver Lake area, the California Highway Patrol reported.

Accardi, 29, suffered minor injuries. Amanda, riding in the back seat, was struck in the head and neck by the car’s 50-pound spare tire, which tore loose and smashed forward from the trunk, a CHP spokesman said. The accident report indicated that “restraints” were in use but it was not clear whether Amanda was in a child-safety seat.

The spokesman said it was raining when the 9:10 a.m. accident occurred, and the freeway’s surface was slick with rain. The investigating officer estimated that the car was traveling in excess of 55 m.p.h.

Accardi, driving north, swerved to his right to avoid traffic ahead of him, and the car went out of control, the CHP spokesman said.

The Mustang struck a guard rail, causing the car to become airborne for a short distance. Then it dived vertically into the ground, according to the accident report.

No citation was issued. Investigation of the accident is continuing.

The child was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she died at 12:12 p.m. Saturday. Amanda had been undergoing periodic treatment at Cedars-Sinai since August, 1982.

A spokeswoman for the medical center said Amanda had been coming in for chemotherapy two or three times a week for the last six months.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Thursday that while neurological and other microscopic tissue tests will not be completed for about 10 days, the child apparently died from head and neck injuries.

In July, 1981, Amanda was under treatment at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles when Michael Accardi went to her room, cut an intravenous line carrying antibiotics into the child’s blood stream and ran with her in his arms to a car waiting outside.

The abduction occurred only a week after doctors had told him the child had leukemia.

Second Abduction

It was the second time he had abducted the child from the hospital. The first was within a few days of her birth when doctors at the same hospital decided Amanda needed a blood transfusion because she was then suffering from jaundice. The baby was returned to the hospital a few days later by a cousin.

After the second abduction, the parents drove their daughter to Tijuana for treatment at Hospital del Mar, run by Dr. Ernesto Contreras Sr., an advocate of the drug Laetrile. However, as Contreras explained later, he did not treat Amanda with Laetrile because he did not believe that it was the best therapy for childhood leukemia.

Authorities in Los Angeles eventually decided not to prosecute the parents and in August, 1982, without explaining their decision, they returned to Los Angeles and took her to Cedars-Sinai for treatment. Her doctor there said six months later that Amanda was “doing well” as an outpatient.

Funeral arrangements are pending with the Neptune Society.