Stigma of SIDS : Is It Sudden Infant Death, or Is It Child Abuse? Grieving Parents Can Find Themselves Under Suspicion

Melinda Dow’s telephone was ringing when she arrived at her office in Long Beach on a seemingly routine morning two years ago this week. Her baby-sitter, a neighbor in Yorba Linda, blurted out the words: Dow’s 7-month-old daughter, Jamie, wasn’t breathing and looked “very strange.”

The sitter had attempted resuscitation and had called 911. When Dow called police, she remembers, “the officer wouldn’t even tell me if she was dead or alive.”

Dow left a frantic message on her husband’s answering machine--he was en route from their home to his Anaheim dental practice--telling him to meet her at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Anaheim, where their daughter had been taken by ambulance.

“We met at the emergency room,” she says. “We had to sit there for what seemed like an eternity.” Still, no news of Jamie’s condition. Finally, a police officer came in and introduced himself--as a detective from homicide.

“From the moment we got to the hospital, we had a detective with us,” Dow says, “and our baby-sitter had one, as well. The detective asked me for a key to my house. They searched everything, went through Jamie’s room, took all of her bedding, her toys. They took everything from our Sinutabs to our aspirin.”

Melinda and Robe Dow realized with a jolt that they were more than distraught parents. They were suspects.

The infant died the next day--after 30 hours in an intensive care unit--and the Dows’ nightmare escalated. In the weeks that followed, they would be interrogated separately by Brea police. Melinda Dow recalls: “They asked how we handled our anger, did we have extramarital affairs, did we take drugs, had I seen my husband abuse my daughter.”

Police asked questions of the Dows’ neighbors. Then one day, a detective called Melinda at work and asked that she and her husband come in again: “Some more tests have come back and the pathologist thinks your daughter was a victim of child abuse.”

The autopsy had shown internal bleeding, suggesting a blow to the abdomen by a blunt instrument. “I completely fell apart,” Dow says. “This practically sent us off the deep end. Not only had we lost our daughter, but (possibly) she had been murdered by our neighbor. We spent two days on tranquilizers, with no idea of time, no desire to live.”

Ultimately, it was established that Jamie had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), that the trauma to her body was the result of vigorous resuscitation efforts.

About four months later, the Dows were asked to come in and pick up their child’s belongings.

Case closed.

SIDS is a disorder that strikes apparently healthy infants as they sleep, causing the airway to become obstructed. It is the leading cause of death nationwide among children between one month and one year of age, killing about 7,000 infants younger than age one each year.

Its cause is unknown. Because death is sudden, and inexplicable, bereaved parents not infrequently find themselves under suspicion. And, in an time of heightened societal awareness about child abuse, some of these parents perceive themselves as victims of a witch hunt.

“It’s definitely an instance of guilty until proven innocent,” says Sharon Dunn of Santa Barbara, founder and president of the Central Coast chapter of the National SIDS Foundation. “I think SIDS parents are going to suffer a good deal until we get people educated.”

It has been 10 years since Dunn’s infant daughter, Jahna, died in her crib. But the psychological trauma, underscored by the insensitivity shown by law enforcement at the time, are vivid in her memory.

She recalls a newspaper article, “Death Still Under Investigation.” And, she says, “suddenly, my friends stopped coming around.”

Because SIDS cannot readily be explained, Dunn believes, SIDS parents are “open to any sort of innuendoes, any hint that we may have done something wrong. And with child abuse being in the forefront, the pendulum has swung so much in that direction that we’re going to have a hard fight.”

In society’s view, Dunn says, “babies don’t die.” Certainly, they don’t die for no apparent reason.

On a hot day in October, 1987, Emily Tyson of Vallejo, a diabetic who was three months pregnant, put her 6-month-old daughter, Kerri, down for a morning nap while she took a shower.

“After that, I don’t remember anything,” she says. When she came to from an apparent diabetic blackout, she recalls Kerri was in trouble in her crib.

Police and paramedics, responding to Tyson’s 911 call, speculated that the child had drowned, because when they arrived, they found her in an empty bathtub with water on her face. The baby was removed immediately to the hospital, but Tyson was detained for questioning by detectives.

“When I got to the hospital,” she says, “they did a bunch of drug testing on me. I didn’t sign any consents, anything like that. I didn’t even know, I was so in shock at the time.”

When her husband, Bob, reached the hospital, a doctor confronted him, “How did she drown?”

It was three weeks before they got the autopsy report: Kerri was not a drowning victim, but had died of SIDS. As best Emily Tyson can piece events together, she must have found the child limp in her crib, and, thinking it was heat prostration, taken her to the tub and splashed water on her face.

The Tysons had moved into that house only 10 days before, and, she says, “the house was just a mess. It kind of put something in the back of (the detectives’) minds.”

Police interrogated their neighbors at length.

To this day, Tyson says, neighborhood kids talk about what happened “that day.”

Earlier this month, a Van Nuys couple, Jose Delgado, 75, and his wife, Theresa, 61, were arrested on suspicion of murder and jailed overnight after 10-week-old Evelyn Figueroa died while they were baby-sitting. Detectives released the Delgados after preliminary autopsy results indicated bruises on the infant’s body could have resulted from the sitters’ efforts to revive her.

Later, Detective Jim Vojtecky said: “The bottom line is the trauma to the head would not have caused death. It appears it might be a crib death.” The coroner’s office is completing tests and expects to make a final determination on cause of death early next week.

In Santa Clara County, Alvia York, 32, is on trial, charged with child molestation and murder with special circumstances in the death of his 4-month-old daughter, Stacy.

It is a controversial case, cited by some members of VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Laws) and advocates for SIDS parents, as a miscarriage of justice.

This is what is known: Late in the afternoon of Nov. 13, 1987, Eileen York left the couple’s San Jose home for Denny’s, where she was a waitress, leaving Stacy, asleep in her crib, and the infant’s sister, Joanna, 4, unsupervised for about 15 minutes, until their father returned from work.

Eileen returned home about 9:20 p.m. Soon afterwards, Alvia left for a second shift as a cook at Denny’s. Just before 10, Eileen found Stacy in her crib, not breathing and “kind of purple.” At 10:45 p.m., in a hospital emergency room, the child was pronounced dead.

The emergency room doctor logged the death as “acute cardiopulmonary arrest . . . possible SIDS.”

Alvia York became a suspect as a result of statements, some contradictory, made to police by emergency-room personnel about the finding of a small amount of blood on the infant’s diaper, as well as a superficial laceration near the entrance to her vagina and a bruise in her rectal area.

Despite a report by the county’s assistant medical examiner that there was “no evidence of any traumatic injury” to the child’s genital tract, nor evidence of attempted penetration, Alvia was charged with murder, lewd and lascivious conduct and rape by a foreign object; unable to post the $350,000 bail, he was jailed for five months.

Dale Sanderson, assistant Santa Clara County district attorney, has said he is convinced that the father penetrated the child, and, while trying to quiet her screams for fear that Joanna would hear, accidentally suffocated her, possibly with a pillow.

Then, Sanderson theorizes, the father put a fresh diaper on her and returned her to her crib.

At a hearing in April, 1988, a judge dismissed charges of molestation and murder for lack of evidence. But Sanderson refiled the charges and a second judge ruled that York should stand trial based on his reading of the transcript of the preliminary hearing. Alvia York is now being tried on those counts, plus a charge of molesting Joanna. He says he is innocent of all accusations.

The medical examiner, Dr. Massoud Vameghi, told the San Francisco Examiner in a July interview that he would probably have reported Stacy’s death as SIDS had he not known about the charges against York. Instead, he listed it as undetermined.

Shoneen Gervich, a Sunnyvale resident and Bay Area spokeswoman for VOCAL, speaks of the potential of innocent parents, already traumatized by the sudden death of an infant, becoming ensnared in false murder charges. SIDS cases, she says, are perhaps “the most horrendous.”

Allen McMahon, a lawyer who is president of the Los Angeles County chapter of VOCAL, vice president of the state group and its national legal adviser, says: “There’s a lot of hysteria about child abuse and a lot of people who don’t know better, and some who should know better, act as though they don’t understand the significance of SIDS.”

Several years ago, he handled the case of David and Exie Balewa, foster parents, who, while in the process of adopting a little girl in their care, had another child placed with them. When the second child died, the Los Angeles County Department of Social Services removed the child they were adopting from their home.

Although it was ruled a SIDS death, it was more than half a year before the daughter they were adopting was returned to them. Says McMahon: “The idea that the child would be deprived of her parents months after it was clear that there was no liability on their part for the other child’s death was just something I found shocking and outrageous.”

McMahon believes those charged with protecting children have gone overboard. Asked whether it is better to err on the side of caution in protecting children, he replies, “Protecting children in what way? By unjustifiably destroying all of their stability when no investigation has been done. . . . I don’t think so.”

In February, in Sacramento, the first statewide conference on child death review will be held under auspices of the California Consortium of Child Abuse Councils. Already in place is a network of county child-death review projects, and consortium project director Paul Crissey calls statewide death review teams “an idea whose time has come.”

He has no statistics. But, Crissey says, “I’m sure there are cases where there is a suspicion of murder or manslaughter that turns out to be SIDS. At the same time, there are certainly a large number of cases that are attributed to SIDS that are murder or manslaughter.

“I don’t think any of us in the child-abuse professions want to victimize innocent parents or innocent care-takers,” he adds. “At the same time, we do want to protect the lives of children.”

In Los Angeles, Dr. Michael Durfee, a child psychiatrist who runs the county Department of Health Services’ child-abuse prevention program, is a leading proponent of the five-person child-death review teams, made up of a coroner-medical examiner and representatives of law enforcement, children’s protective services and the health department.

“We go to the coroner looking for all potentially suspicious child deaths,” says Durfee. He points out that in one year, 1983, seven cases signed over as natural- or accidental deaths turned out to be death at the hands of another.

He adds: “In the middle of all this, the SIDS cases come up. They are problematic, anyway. In fact, there was a case where a mother had a child signed out as SIDS. Later, she confessed that she had suffocated that child, and, three years earlier, she had done that to another kid.”

The death-review committees, 10 years in existence, have had cases listed as homicides changed to SIDS deaths, he says. “The most common change in a SIDS diagnosis is not to homicide,” he says, but “to another medical phenomenon.”

Dealing with SIDS children and their parents is, he concedes, “an incredible dilemma. There is a clear need to be respectful of adults who have had a child die.”

He suggests that “passionate advocates on both sides need to meet each other. They don’t want to hurt parents--and we don’t want kids murdered.”

Durfee observes: “I do not think there is a large phenomenon of homicide masquerading as SIDS. But it does happen.

“In L.A. County, we know much more about stolen BMWs than we know about murdered kids. As a culture, we are not respectful of the death of children. It’s almost as if, until Lisa Steinberg died (the victim in a much-publicized New York abuse case), there was no such thing as fatal child abuse.”

Despite the current “explosion” of interest nationwide in investigating children’s deaths, Durfee adds, the average child death gets little respect: “If I die while we’re talking on the phone, it’s a big deal. . . . But if I’m a minority infant who was bathed in cocaine before I was born, and my mother’s in trouble in jail, even if I’m murdered . . . it’s boring stuff.”

Gayla Reiter-Scott of Benicia, president of the Northern California SIDS Advisory Council--and the mother of Layla, who died of SIDS at the age of 5 months in 1985--has been a driving force behind legislation signed into state law in October that allocates $800,000 for education, training, support services and research around SIDS.

The four bills were written by Sen. Dan Boatwright (D-Concord), whose aide, Barry Brokaw, lost his 3-month-old son, Kevin, to SIDS in November, 1988.

One measure, SB 1067, requires that new police officers, firefighters and paramedics be trained about SIDS as part of their initial certification. It specifies that police death-scene investigation-training include SIDS awareness. SB 1069 requires adoption of a standardized autopsy protocol in all cases of sudden, unexplained infant death; when the protocol standards are met, it calls for listing of SIDS as cause of death.

Reiter-Scott says: “It is important to investigate and get child abuse out of the closet but there hasn’t been a parallel education effort concerning SIDS. . . . It’s like the pendulum swung too far to one side. Now we just have to bring it back into equilibrium.”

She is concerned that one impact of the death-review teams in the current climate will be that “coroners are reluctant to list SIDS as cause of death. Certainly, we want to identify any case of child abuse. We don’t want kids dying of child abuse. On the other hand, 800 to 1,000 babies die of SIDS (each year) in California,” far fewer than die of child abuse in the infant group.

Reiter-Scott serves on a national committee that hopes to get federal legislation patterned after the California model. “There’s been a nationwide emphasis on child abuse,” she says, “but because of the lack of information about SIDS, we’re back to where we were 20 or 30 years ago.”

Bruising and edema resulting from resuscitation efforts are common in SIDS victims, which makes it an even tougher call for a police officer or firefighter at the scene.

“In the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s, there were some terrible witch hunts going on” with SIDS families as targets, says Margo Derry, nursing program specialist for the child and adolescent health program, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. “We thought that was all over. Now it’s starting all over again,” with the child death-review teams.

Derry says: “We have a lot of SIDS deaths here. We run an average of 210 babies (in Los Angeles County) that die every year.” Nationwide, about two of each 1,000 children born alive die of SIDS; in Los Angeles County, that figure is 1.4 per 1,000, which suggests to her that the coroner’s office is scrutinizing these cases very carefully.

Derry, moderator of the Southern California SIDS Advisory Council, which assists SIDS families, says: “I have real strong feelings about allegations being made before an autopsy is done.”

In some areas, she believes, the child-abuse prevention people “may be going a little overboard.” She doesn’t hesitate to include in her indictment Durfee and the death review teams. In some counties, “where nobody is looking at child deaths, it may be appropriate to stir up the waters,” she says. But Los Angeles County, she notes, “has follow-up by public health nurses on every diagnosed SIDS case. More people are looking at SIDS families than those of children who could possibly have been murdered.”

Lt. Richard Iddings, the Los Angeles Police Department officer in charge of the child protection section, endorses required SIDS training for law-enforcement personnel but wonders if “anyone is going to be able to tell us how to recognize SIDS. I don’t think there really is an easy way to recognize a SIDS death.

“I don’t think it will ever get to the point beyond a reasonable doubt where we can say it’s that by just viewing the body at the death scene,” he says.

In 1989, in the city of Los Angeles, there were 13 homicides in which victims were younger than age 10, and, he says, “I’d guess 10 of those were probably the shaken infant thing,” cases of infants being shaken to death.

In these cases, as with SIDS, he says, there may be no visible sign of a cause of death--and some are initially diagnosed as SIDS. As for the average patrol officer, he acknowledges, “I doubt they’re all familiar with SIDS.”

Families may be traumatized in the investigative process, Iddings says, but “you gotta find out what happened.

“I don’t know if you’ll ever end up making officers sensitive to certain situations,” he adds. “It’s like the old Jack Webb thing--nothing but the facts, ma’am. I can see them getting to the point where they say, ‘Nothing but the facts, ma’am.’ ”