Exhumation OKd in Baby Death Suit

A young mother who claims medical malpractice at a Sylmar hospital resulted in the death of her 5-day-old child will have the infant’s body exhumed and genetic tests conducted in an attempt to prove the baby who died was the one she gave birth to.

Steven Ruiz died Feb. 5, 1990, as a result of a congenital defect that doctors and nurses at Olive View Medical Center missed, Patricia Chavez, 17, alleges.

But attorneys for Los Angeles County, which owns the hospital, have sought to raise doubts about the identity of the child the baby’s parents buried at San Fernando Mission Cemetery.

Aileen Norvell Goldstein, a Burbank attorney representing Chavez in the Los Angeles Superior Court suit, said the county’s allegations have forced her clients--Chavez and her boyfriend, Reynaldo Ruiz, 21, the child’s father--to authorize the exhumation.

Goldstein said she would try to have the body exhumed as soon as possible, depending on the schedules of the parties involved. Afterward, it will take three to four days to obtain results of the DNA tests on tissue from the infant and blood from Chavez and Ruiz.

“It’s really hard for me and Reynaldo,” Chavez said of the decision to exhume the body. “Really, I don’t want to do it. . . . But I want to make everybody know that I did not change the baby. I don’t want it to look like I am the one who is lying.”

The county counsel’s office, which is supervising the response to the lawsuit, has acknowledged that allegations about the identity of the child have not been thoroughly investigated. But in legal documents, attorneys for a Pasadena law firm hired by the county repeatedly claim that Steven Ruiz was not the child Chavez gave birth to at Olive View. The attorneys did not return telephone calls from The Times Tuesday.

The child that died at Northridge Hospital Medical Center after emergency surgery to attempt to repair tears in its bowel tract did not have a normal anus and could not eliminate wastes, according to hospital records.

Olive View hospital medical records indicate that the Chavez baby had a normal anus and had several bowel movements. Doubts about those records have been raised in court depositions.

County attorneys have also pointed to slight differences in weight, length and body marks recorded in the Olive View records and during the county coroner’s autopsy.

Jennifer Mihalovich, a criminalist with Forensic Science Associates in Richmond, Calif., a leading DNA laboratory, said a test could determine only whether it was possible for Chavez and Ruiz to have been the baby’s parents. Although a more sophisticated test could narrow the odds, she said it would be virtually impossible to prove conclusively that they were the dead child’s parents.

County Supervisor Gloria Molina voiced concern about the county’s position in the case.

“I’m equally as concerned as the lawyer (Goldstein) with the kind of defense that we’re putting up; that this young woman switched the babies . . . ,” she said. “Where is this other baby? Does someone have this woman’s baby?”

Molina said exhumation should not be necessary.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich said he favored the DNA test.

“There should have been a DNA test at the beginning,” he said. “We thought they (the parents) . . . were refusing.”

Times staff writer Amy Pyle contributed to this story