A Baby’s Death: Will It Be Unsolved Mystery? : Child care: The county is investigating whether the coroner’s office botched the case after a 3-month-old boy dies.

Aaron Abernathy stopped breathing in his baby-sitter’s arms one cold February afternoon and died hours later in the same Los Angeles hospital where he was born just three months before.

He was buried in a pale blue casket at Forest Lawn cemetery on a hill set aside for the graves of babies. His baby-sitter, a matronly grandmother of five named Dora Kerr, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and child abuse.

Two doctors who examined Aaron at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center say he was violently shaken to death, an abuse against children so common that experts have given it a name, Shaken Baby Syndrome.

What happened to Aaron Abernathy may never be known. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office is under investigation by the county’s Child Death Review Committee for possibly botching the case. The death occurred when the coroner was overwhelmed with bodies from a Feb. 1 plane crash at Los Angeles International Airport.

The coroner’s office has “disposed of” the baby’s brain, a key piece of evidence needed to prove the prosecution’s case. As a result, the district attorney may not have enough evidence to hold the April 2 preliminary hearing, much less convince a trial jury of manslaughter.

Meanwhile, Lysa Abernathy, Aaron’s 24-year-old single mother, is sleeping in a bedroom with an empty crib and living the nightmare of every parent forced to rely on child care.

Kerr, the 53-year-old woman never before charged with a crime, is accused of killing a baby she says she did not harm.

Abernathy was unmarried and working as a switchboard operator when she learned she was pregnant, but never for a moment did she doubt that she would keep him.

Aaron arrived at seven minutes past midnight on Halloween. With less than two months before she was due back at work, Abernathy began the frustrating search for a baby-sitter.

None of the women she interviewed spoke English. She was referred to the mother of a friend--a woman from the Central American country of Belize who had raised six children of her own in Los Angeles. Kerr agreed to take care of Aaron for only $60 a week.

“I thought she was a godsend,” Abernathy remembered, smoking a cigarette in her Studio City apartment one recent afternoon. Aaron--a chubby, healthy baby with a fondness for Mickey Mouse--woke up smiling Feb. 4. His mother drove him to the sitter’s house and kissed him goodby. When she called at 11 a.m. to check on him, Aaron was napping. At 2:30 p.m., the hospital called her.

Kerr was sitting on a waiting room couch, arms folded, Abernathy remembers. The baby was in a steel crib hooked up to a web of tubes. A respirator was breathing for him.

Dr. Andrea Morrison, a neurologist at Cedars, said there was blood behind the baby’s eyes--retinal hemorrhaging, a strong sign of Shaken Baby Syndrome, according to hospital records.

“Have you ever shaken Aaron in any way, like you couldn’t take his crying anymore?” Morrison asked Abernathy. No, came the answer. A team of police officers arrived with more questions. It was suggested gently that Abernathy call for a minister to baptize her son.

There are no precise statistics on the number of victims of Shaken Baby Syndrome, but medical experts estimate that it accounts for about 10% of reported child abuse cases. Childrens Hospital Los Angeles reports about one case a month, and physicians estimate that for every reported case, there are 10 they never see.

The victims are generally younger than 2, doctors say, because the brain is relatively soft and the neck muscles are too weak to support the head. When a child is shaken very violently--not a normal rocking or a gentle bounce--the brain bangs against the skull and bruises. The symptoms include drowsiness, vomiting, blood from the nose and unconsciousness. The injuries range from brain damage to death.

Most doctors say the syndrome is difficult to diagnose, but after examining Aaron at the hospital, Drs. Morrison and Henry Chan agreed that shaking appeared to be the cause.

The day Aaron died, Kerr was jailed in lieu of $50,000 bail--a woman the neighbors call “Mom,” a mother who was widowed while three months pregnant, but went on to raise six children without public assistance, even putting two through college.

“She is my role model,” Kerr’s daughter, Judy Kerr-Benn, a Los Angeles traffic officer, said during an interview in the halls of the Los Angeles courthouse where her mother has pleaded innocent. “She never even spanked us. These charges are just absurd.”

Kerr’s Los Angeles attorney, Brendan O’Neill, would not allow his client to be interviewed for this article, but he said Kerr is confident she will be cleared. Court records and the recording of Kerr’s 911 call for help reveal her account of what happened that afternoon.

She said she fed Aaron at about 1 p.m. and was burping him when he let out a scream. He started to cry then went limp in her arms. Thinking he was asleep, she put him in his crib. He was not breathing. Blood was coming from his nose. She called 911 and started cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

“He was crying and I was walking him up and down,” a frantic-sounding Kerr said on the 911 tape. Her voice sounds high-pitched and mournful and she is breathing fast. “He’s only 3 months old. . . . No, the baby is not breathing. . . . Oh God, please help me make the baby revive.”

Abernathy gave her consent and the doctors took Aaron off life-support at about 1 a.m. Feb. 5. She sat by his bedside through the night. At 9:30 the next morning, when she stepped out for a cup of coffee, Aaron died.

The doctor gave her the news in the hall. She went straight in and picked Aaron up. He felt so warm. In a moment of confusion, she thanked the doctor “for making him better,” and started out the door with her baby’s body. Then she fainted.

When Aaron’s body was turned over to the coroner, the office was overwhelmed with the task of identifying 34 victims from a plane crash at Los Angeles International Airport four days before, when a USAir jet landed on top of a SkyWest commuter airliner.

Prosecutors had 48 hours to charge Kerr or release her, and no autopsy had been conducted to determine the cause of Aaron’s death. Based on the opinions of Cedars’ doctors--and the concern that Kerr was caring for other children--Deputy Dist. Atty. Carolyn McNary filed charges of manslaughter and child abuse. Kerr was barred by a court order from caring for children.

Dr. Irwin Golden performed an autopsy on Aaron’s body Feb. 8, a procedure under review by the Child Death Review Committee of the county’s Interagency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect. The committee is a nationally recognized team of law enforcement and child abuse experts that examines in detail about 20 suspected cases of fatal child abuse yearly.

“We are looking at the case,” said Michael Durfee, co-chair of the committee, which only has the power to recommend procedural changes. “If it was botched, then we need to deal with that.”

The following allegations are under review, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Fred Klink, in charge of the sex crimes and child abuse unit:

* No police officer witnessed Aaron’s autopsy, common procedure in such cases, because the coroner’s office failed to give the investigating officer proper notice.

* Golden neglected to look at the case history before examining the body--including Morrison’s conclusion of Shaken Baby Syndrome--and was unaware of what to look for or that criminal charges had been filed.

* When the prosecutor sought to have the brain examined by an independent expert, she was told it was “disposed of.” The coroner found no bruises on the brain, an important factor in corroborating the shaking syndrome.

“They kept one tiny piece of the brain on a glass slide,” Klink said. “That denies the defense the opportunity to examine the brain and it denies the prosecution the opportunity to call in an independent expert.”

Neither Golden nor Dr. Lawrence Cogan, acting chief medical examiner, responded to The Times’ requests for interviews.

In the final autopsy report completed last week, the coroner listed the cause of Aaron’s death as Shaken Baby Syndrome. The conclusion hung, in part, on a statement to police that Aaron was “bounced on the sitter’s knee for several minutes”--not the sort of violent shaking experts say can kill.

“That doesn’t sound very scientific to me,” Klink said. “I haven’t seen anything yet that says retinal hemorrhaging alone and a dead baby is enough to substantiate Shaken Baby Syndrome.”

Klink said his office is reviewing the evidence and will decide, possibly as early as today, whether to prosecute Kerr.

If the case is dropped, Aaron goes to his grave a legal mystery.

“It just makes me so angry that the system that is there to protect us can be so screwed up,” Lysa Abernathy said.

“I couldn’t wait to go to Disneyland with him and see it through a child’s eyes again. I couldn’t wait for him to throw his food all over the walls. I had so many plans,” she said, retrieving Aaron’s unfinished baby book to spend another afternoon sobbing over his death and smiling at his memory.