Grand Jury Rejects Murder Count : Teary Father Not Charged in Death of Comatose Boy

A Cook County grand jury Thursday voted against a murder indictment for Rudolfo Linares, the father who held hospital workers at gunpoint, disconnected his brain-damaged, comatose 15-month-old son from a respirator and, weeping, cradled the dying baby.

Linares had tears in his eyes again Thursday after hearing the grand jury’s decision. He had contended that he disconnected young Samuel from the machines three weeks ago “out of love.”

The 23-year-old house painter from Cicero did plead guilty to the unlawful use of a weapon--a misdemeanor--and was placed on one year’s probation by Circuit Judge Robert Bastone for holding a cocked .357 magnum revolver on hospital personnel. Linares was also ordered to undergo psychological counseling.

“As far as punishment is concerned,” Bastone said Thursday, “I think you have suffered enough.”

“I’m glad everything is more or less behind me,” Linares told reporters outside the Cook County Criminal Court. “I want to just go home and spend some time together with my family.” He and his wife, Tamara, have two other small children.

“Justice was done,” said Philip Mullane, a public defender who headed the three-man defense team.

The Linares case focused worldwide attention on the medical and moral issues involved in artificially maintaining life functions in brain-damaged patients and presented a dilemma for law enforcement authorities. Although not brain dead, Samuel Linares suffered irreversible brain damage after inhaling and choking on a balloon nine months earlier. Doctors said there was no chance the baby would recover.

“It was a unique and frustrating case,” said Cook County State’s Atty. Cecil Partee, who charged Linares with murder and presented the matter to the grand jury. “His actions in removing his son from a respirator were simultaneously inappropriate under the law and understandable from the purview and perspective of a parent.”

Rush Presbyterian Hospital, where the baby died, said in a prepared statement that “the criminal prosecution of Rudy Linares for murder would have provided no meaningful clarification of the law in Illinois as to the withdrawal of life-support systems from children. We share the relief of the Linares family in the judgment of the grand jury.”

Defense attorneys and a spokesman for Partee agreed that the grand jury’s decision was largely shaped by Cook County Medical Examiner Robert J. Stein, who refused to classify the baby’s death a homicide. Instead, Stein listed the cause of death as “undetermined” and raised the possibility that the death was the result of both inhaling the balloon and the termination of life support.

No Homicide Declared

“The medical examiner did not determine that what happened to Samuel Linares was, in fact, a homicide, therefore the result today . . . was like night follows day,” said Kevin Smith, one of Linares’ attorneys.

Partee said he would form a committee of legal, religious and medical authorities to explore the issues raised by the Linares case. The hospital encouraged state legislators to re-examine laws relating to life-support issues.

The April 26 incident was the second attempt Linares made to disconnect the baby’s life-support system. Hospital personnel had thwarted his first attempt several weeks earlier.

Published reports indicated that he acted the second time after learning from hospital authorities that the baby would be moved to a suburban long-term care facility.

It was also alleged, in the course of investigating the incident, that Linares and his wife may have misled state welfare authorities about their living arrangement and may have collected more than $100,000 in welfare medical payments improperly.

State officials are apparently not vigorously pursuing the case now.

Meanwhile, the Linareses, who were inundated with sympathetic cards, letters, calls and contributions from around the world, said they would try to respond to those expressions of support in the coming weeks.

“Some people sent checks for $10 and $15,” said Mullane. “They were turned over to the funeral home, and those people actually buried Samuel Linares.”