Ventura County, State Won’t Try Simi Baby Sitter in Girl’s Death

Despite lingering doubts on the part of one state prosecutor, the Ventura County district attorney’s office has decided not to prosecute a Simi Valley baby sitter in the death of a 15-month-old girl who suffered massive head injuries while in her care.

And the state attorney general’s office, which conducted its own probe into the 1983 death of Natalie Hsieh, also has decided against prosecution, a spokesman said Monday.

The case has been kept alive for more than three years because of intense lobbying by the victim’s grandfather, who said he did not believe the baby sitter’s explanation that Natalie was injured in an accidental fall from a kitchen table.

But prosecutors have concluded that the evidence is “not strong enough to rule out the possibility of accidental death,” said Vincent O’Neill, chief deputy district attorney.

“We agree as an office that prosecution is not warranted,” said John H. Sugiyama, senior assistant attorney general.

Baby sitter Brenda Yang, 33, has been under investigation off and on since the Hsieh (pronounced shay) baby, experiencing difficulty breathing, was rushed to the hospital from the Yang home on Feb. 3, 1983.

Trial Recommended

Last April, Deputy Atty. Gen. Charles R. B. Kirk issued a 12-page report on the case concluding, “I recommend that the baby sitter, Brenda Yang, should be charged with second-degree murder in the homicide of Natalie Hsieh.”

In a telephone interview Monday from his San Francisco office, Kirk, who works for Sugiyama, said he has seen “nothing that would make me change my mind” about his recommendation to prosecute.

The state probe was conducted in response to a letter-writing campaign by Chang Kuo-sin, the dead baby’s grandfather.

A communications professor at Hong Kong Baptist College, Chang said in an interview in May that he has written as many as 100 letters to keep up pressure for prosecution.

Gemma Hsieh, the dead baby’s mother, said her father was traveling overseas and could not be reached, adding, “But I’m certain he will be disappointed, and he will do something.”

Yang, who has refused to discuss the case in the past, was unavailable for comment.

In 1983, Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury announced that he would not prosecute Yang because evidence indicated that the baby’s death resulted from an “improbable but still quite possible” accidental fall from Yang’s kitchen table to a thickly carpeted floor.

Other Reports Differ

The decision was at odds both with the Simi Valley police report and an investigation by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

The coroner handled the case because the baby died at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles.

Both the police and the coroner’s office concluded that the massive head and body injuries that caused Natalie’s death could not have occurred in the manner described by Yang.

Both agencies ruled it a homicide and recommended that Yang be charged with murder.

In 1985, in response to Chang’s letters, the attorney general’s office convened a panel of experts to review the case. They recommended a full investigation, which was assigned to Kirk.

In his April 21 report, Kirk said that Dr. Boyd Stephens, chief medical examiner for San Francisco, had determined “beyond a medical certainty that the injury could not possibly have occurred” in a fall from a 30-inch-high table.

O’Neill said in the review that followed Kirk’s report, “Not much new of significance was uncovered. But we determined that it is not provable beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime has occurred here.”

Sugiyama said his office, while permitted under state law to prosecute the case on its own, has decided not to do so “because that is something done only when the evidence is compelling, and that is not the situation here.”

Her Children Napping

According to police reports, Yang told police the fall occurred while her own children, then ages 4 and 1, were napping.

The baby sitter said she placed Natalie in a highchair next to a table without attaching the safety strap.

Yang said she then stepped to the stove to warm baby food. When she turned around a moment later, Yang said, the baby was falling from the table.

She told police she made a “desperation” leap to catch Natalie, but failed.

She said the baby fell head first, then twisted sideways and hit her body against a table leg.

Hsieh, who owns a furniture upholstery shop in Pacoima with her husband, Thomas, said she emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in 1973.

She said she selected Yang as baby sitter partly because she also was an immigrant from Taiwan.