Local News in Brief : Black-Market Drug Case

The first swap meet vendor in the state charged with selling black-market prescription drugs was sentenced Thursday to three years’ probation after pleading no contest to selling dangerous drugs to a Northridge woman whose ailing toddler later died.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office, which filed misdemeanor charges against Santa Elba Hernandez, vowed to use the case to push for closer state monitoring of the sale of pharmaceutical drugs--usually smuggled from Mexico--at swap meets around Southern California.

Hernandez, 43, was also ordered to perform 100 hours of community work and was ordered to pay a $500 fine. She also agreed to pay $500 for investigative costs to the Los Angeles Police Department, which arrested her and confiscated her drug inventory in June, 1987.

Jesse Gonzalez, 2, of Northridge died 10 hours after his mother had a neighborhood folk medicine practitioner inject him with a liquid purchased at Hernandez’s booth at the Sun Valley Discount Center.

At first, police sought felony charges because they suspected a link between the drug and the death. But the district attorney’s office ruled out felony charges when the county coroner determined that Jesse had died from a lung infection unrelated to the medication, which turned out to be an antihistamine.