Immigrant Girl, 17, Tested by Legal Fight : Courts: Now apparently exonerated, she fought county’s contention that dying baby she brought to hospital was not hers.

The controversial medical malpractice lawsuit that Patty Chavez filed against Los Angeles County over the death of her newborn baby has forced the teen-ager to live in two worlds.

One world is known as Tijuanita, or Little Tijuana, a strip of government-subsidized apartments in Northridge where she and her boyfriend share a two-bedroom unit with four other people.

Peddlers walk door-to-door carrying trays of pan dulce , or sweet breads, for sale. Men wearing T-shirts gather in the shade after work to drink beer and talk while apron-clad women scurry about their small kitchens preparing tortillas by hand. Clutches of children play loudly.

Now almost daily, Chavez, 17, leaves this familiar place where her parents, brothers, sisters and many friends live, for an alien world of depositions, media interviews and skepticism. At the Burbank high-rise office of her lawyer, Aileen Goldstein, she is asked to remember the tiniest details of the Feb. 5, 1990, death of her 5-day-old baby, Steven Antonio Ruiz, from the lack of an anal opening, a birth defect that she says was overlooked by doctors and nurses.

Chavez became pregnant at 14 and has an eighth-grade education. Until Tuesday, when DNA tests showed that she and her boyfriend could be the parents of the dead baby, the county alleged in legal papers that the infant Chavez took home from its Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar was healthy and that the child she, her father and boyfriend rushed to Northridge Hospital Medical Center for unsuccessful emergency surgery was someone else’s.

To back up their claims, attorneys pointed to discrepancies in records from the hospital and from the coroner’s autopsy report. Although they gave no reasons for the alleged baby switch in court papers, attorneys said privately that the child who died might have been born to a mother who was an illegal immigrant, afraid she would be sent back to Mexico if she took it to a hospital.

Although Chavez speaks and reads English, she is more comfortable communicating in Spanish, and often has had trouble understanding the attorneys’ questions during nearly eight hours of depositions.

For many months, Chavez said, sleep was the only source of calm. “I couldn’t believe this whole thing was happening to me. Sometimes I just wanted to sleep and never wake up again. I was so hurt and I’m still hurt.”

But she and her boyfriend, Reynaldo Ruiz, and her parents, Carmen and Samuel Chavez, say they are committed to doing whatever is necessary to prove their case against the county and two private agencies that supplied temporary nurses to the hospital.

Last week Chavez and Ruiz agreed to have the child’s body exhumed so that DNA tests, which they hope will help prove they are the parents, can be conducted. But a lawyer in the county counsel’s office said tissue saved during the autopsy could be tested for a DNA match, avoiding the need for an exhumation.

On Tuesday, tests were performed on the couple and results compared with the baby’s tissue. Although the results could not definitively prove who were the parents of Steven Ruiz, they showed that Chavez and Ruiz could have been the infant’s parents.

Late Tuesday, Assistant County Counsel Robert Ambrose said the results provided the “conclusive proof” the county had sought that the couple is the baby’s parents and that the matter would now go before a judge, who would help the parties reach a settlement.

“I don’t want people to look at me like I am lying,” Chavez said last week. “I want the public to know. (The county) knows they did something wrong, but they don’t want to say the truth. . . .”

Ruiz acknowledged that when they become sick, illegal immigrants living nearby sometimes use Medi-Cal health insurance cards of others. But before Tuesday’s dramatic developments, he said that his girlfriend would not aid such a scheme, and two neighbors, in addition to her family, said they saw the baby the day it came home from the hospital and the same baby again at Northridge the day it died.

Chavez’s father, Samuel, a burly construction worker who lifts weights and who remodeled the family’s apartment, was adamant. “I don’t understand why they’re saying what they’re saying,” he said in Spanish. “No one at 14 or 15 years would ever think of doing that.”

Asked why tears come when he talks about the county’s statements, the father said he felt bad for his oldest daughter, not for the baby that would have been his first grandchild.

“The dead are dead,” he said. “What’s happening to Patty is what matters. . . . Sometimes it’s hard to be brave, hard to forget.”

At 13, Patty had planned to finish school, become a secretary and help support her parents. Instead she met Ruiz. He had recently arrived in Northridge from the same village in the Mexican state of Michoacan where Patty was born. She said her family had known his for a long time.

They remember their meeting differently.

She said she went to his brother’s house and he answered the door. Ruiz said a friend told him about her, that she was very pretty, and he went to see for himself. He was nearly 19 and ready to settle down.

But they both use the same words to explain the subsequent events, when they ran away together to live in Sepulveda against her family’s wishes. “Nos agarro de locura , “ Chavez said, a phrase she translated as “something crazy came over us.”

Samuel Chavez’s friends urged him to call the police because his daughter was so young. The girl’s mother, Carmen, said she was sad at the time because the family was preparing to celebrate Patty’s 15th birthday. But both her parents said she was a “good girl” and they welcomed her back when she became pregnant and moved into an apartment a half-block away.

The teen-ager showed up for every prenatal-care appointment except one at a county clinic in Canoga Park. Each appointment was over quickly, though, and she said she received no advice about caring for her baby after it was born.

She had baby-sat for her younger brothers--Sergio, 13, and Mario, 11--and had changed diapers for Julie, 3. But, she admits, “I knew nothing about babies” when hers was born. Another sister, Alejandra, is nearly a year old.

According to Olive View medical records, the birth went normally. The child was born at 1 p.m. on Jan. 31, 1990, with pursed lips, chubby cheeks and a thick head of black hair. Over the next two days, the atmosphere in the hospital room was “happy, joyous,” according to a nurse.

Two doctors and several nurses examined the baby, and every entry on the baby’s chart indicated it was normal.

Two days after Chavez and the baby came home, after two long nights during which she said he cried almost constantly, Carmen Chavez came to fix her daughter’s breakfast and saw that the baby was turning purple. Eleven hours later, after emergency surgery at Northridge Hospital to repair tears in its bowel tract, the baby died.

Ruiz said he thought about leaving, first alone, then with Chavez. “It was really hard for me,” he said, as Chavez sat next to him, stroking his hair. She, too, wanted to forget and she became pregnant again. That pregnancy ended in a miscarriage last fall, and now she is two months pregnant.

Her family and friends have rallied around during the yearlong legal battle, saying they want to see the couple vindicated.