Questions About Baby’s Death Linger : Investigations: City prosecutors want D.A. to reopen year-old case. But officials say evidence won’t support felony charges.

The short life of Keosha Williams ended one year ago. Hers was a particularly gruesome death; relatives told authorities they found the 11-month-old hanging by her T-shirt from a nail near the bottom of a doorway in a filthy, rat- and roach-infested house in Los Angeles. She had bruises on her head, an apparent cigarette burn on her hand and a severe case of diaper rash.

The coroner ruled the death an accident. The police agreed, and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office refused to file felony child endangering charges against the child’s mother. But city prosecutors are raising questions about the death of Keosha, and whether it was in fact an accident--or a crime whose investigation was bungled.

“Babies don’t hang themselves on nails,” said Deputy City Atty. Ted Smith, who has filed misdemeanor child endangering charges against the mother and her boyfriend. “Babies don’t bruise themselves on the top of their heads. Babies don’t get cigarette burns above their knuckles. Something’s wrong here.”

The case has exposed a rift between the district attorney’s office, which is responsible for prosecuting felonies, and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, which is restricted to handling misdemeanors. Smith and his superiors tried unsuccessfully to persuade Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner to take the case back, saying that--at the very least--the mother and her boyfriend should be charged with felony child endangering. At the most, they say, the death should have been investigated as a possible homicide.

While top district attorney’s officials agreed to take a second look at the matter, on Thursday they decided to stick by their original judgment. After an hourlong conference that included Reiner’s chief deputy, they decided there is not enough evidence to warrant a felony child endangering prosecution, much less a homicide probe.

“We’re in the proof business,” said Abram Weisbrot, district attorney official who re-examined the case. “If we had proof that this baby did not accidentally get hooked on this nail, we would prosecute this case to the full extent. But we don’t have any evidence of that sort. . . . What they (the mother and boyfriend) are responsible for and culpable for is a lack of supervision and an extremely dirty home, which is basically a misdemeanor.”

Meanwhile, time is running short for the city attorney. Under the statute of limitations, the misdemeanor trial of Keosha’s mother, 19-year-old Kristina Scott, and her boyfriend, Luther Byers, 24, must begin Tuesday. The city’s case rests on the theory that the home was in such disarray, with exposed nails and trash everywhere, that it was a hazard to the child.

Both Scott and Byers, who face a maximum sentence of one year in County Jail, are in custody awaiting trial. Lawyers for Scott and Byers said they believe the death was accidental, and that their clients are innocent of wrongdoing. “Miss Scott had nothing to do with her baby’s death,” said Deputy Public Defender Paul Metzger, who represents Scott. “A house that isn’t clean doesn’t cause a baby to die.”

Yet Smith, the deputy city attorney, is not alone in raising questions about the death of Keosha. Doctors who treated the child at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center were also skeptical that the death could have been an accident. But they, like others close to the case, had no idea who might have been responsible.

“Her physical findings were consistent with strangulation,” said one pediatrician who asked not to be identified, “but we still don’t know exactly what happened. You’ve got to wonder. . . . It’s real suspicious.”

The case was also examined by the county’s Child Death Review Team, an arm of the county agency that is charged with monitoring child abuse. The agency’s executive director, Deanne Tilton, said she found Keosha’s death particularly troubling. “I feel uneasy about cases like this,” she said, “where you have this definite sense that there was a crime committed or that a child was abused or even killed.”

Even the Los Angeles police detective who investigated the case, Bernice Rivera, said she has never been absolutely certain about what happened. “I honest to God don’t know,” she said. “It could have gone either way.”

From the time Keosha was discovered unconscious in the late afternoon of Feb. 14, 1991--a year ago today--there were questions about how she got that way. A report by a coroner’s investigator notes that the infant was killed by “strangulation of questionable circumstances” and says there were conflicting stories from her family:

“One story is that the child was found with her clothes stuck on a nail in the doorway and she apparently could not get free and strangled,” the report states. “Another story is that teen-agers were playing with the child, tossing her into the air, missed and the child fell to the ground. The paramedics report states the child was found by the family with a cord wrapped around her neck.”

The account that became accepted as the official version of events was the first one. Nobody in a position of authority actually saw Keosha--who was 31 inches tall and could walk if she held onto furniture--caught on the doorway nail, which was at a height of 22 inches. But police believed the statements of the baby’s aunt and 14-year-old cousin, who said they discovered the child in that position.

From interviews with family members, police said they determined that no one was home with Keosha at the time of her injury.

Scott, the mother, told police she left the child in the care of her boyfriend, Byers. The two shared a house on 89th Street in Los Angeles with about half a dozen members of Scott’s extended family, including four other children under the age of 13.

When Scott returned from her afternoon outing, she asked Byers where “the kids” were. Byers replied that they were at a relative’s house. He said he neglected to tell Scott that her infant daughter was sleeping in bed. Scott, meanwhile, told police she assumed that Keosha was with the other children. So, according to her account to police, she left the house--inadvertently leaving the baby alone.

Rivera, the LAPD investigator, said the house was so dirty, with clothes piled everywhere and garbage strewn all over the floor, that it is possible Scott did not see her daughter in bed.

“You couldn’t have found a baby elephant over there,” she said.

At some point, Keosha’s cousin arrived at the 89th Street house. She told police that she found the side door ajar and the baby caught on the nail. She said she left the baby there and ran across the street to a liquor store to call her mother, who came to the house and removed the child. They said they called 911, and also called Scott, who returned to find that her child had already been taken to the hospital, where she died a day later.

Smith, the city prosecutor, cites what he says are several glaring inconsistencies in the investigation of Keosha’s death. The most prominent can be found in the analysis of the baby’s T-shirt conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department’s crime lab. Although the baby was said to have been strangled by the shirt, the crime lab found no evidence of damage to the weave of the fabric, and no stretching of the shirt around the collar.

Moreover, Smith questions why the baby’s cousin would have found the door wide open if the mother had left the house believing nobody was home. The police investigative report does not say whether detectives asked the mother if she had left the door ajar. If she did not--and if nobody else was home--how did it get that way? Certainly, Smith says, Keosha did not open it herself.

Most important, Smith said, is that the case sat idle for a crucial, seven-month period between the time of the baby’s death Feb. 15 and the time the district attorney’s office reviewed it Sept. 4. Deputy Dist. Atty. Fred Klink, who initially rejected the case for prosecution, blamed the delay on a long wait for the coroner’s report.

Smith argues that the case should have been reviewed by the district attorney’s office at once. While Klink and Weisbrot of the district attorney’s office said the initial police investigation was sufficient, Smith argues there should have been an immediate follow-up investigation. Instead, the LAPD reopened the case last month as a result of Smith’s prodding. But time had passed and little else was learned.

“This begs for more answers,” Smith said. “You’ve got a dead baby here that’s dead for almost a year that is just now getting her case heard, and that’s a problem.”