‘Baby Jesse’ Dies as Second Heart Transplant Fails : Medicine: The child underwent his first surgery at 16 days old. His seven years of life were marked by hope and controversy.

Jesse Dean Sepulveda, who gained fame as “Baby Jesse” when he underwent a heart transplant 16 days after his birth, died Friday just one month after receiving a second transplant that doctors hoped would save his life. He was 7 years old.

The boy died at 2:36 p.m. at Loma Linda University Medical Center 60 miles east of Los Angeles, hospital spokesman Dick Schaefer announced.

Only last Monday, Schaefer had made public the fact that Jesse was being treated for severe rejection of the second new heart, which he received June 16. Schaefer said he made Jesse’s condition public at the request of the boy’s parents, who wanted people to pray for their son.

The Pasadena-born child had been released in good condition June 28 after the second transplant. But he was readmitted July 6 for mild rejection problems. His condition suddenly worsened last Sunday.

Suffering from fatal hypoplastic left-heart syndrome, Baby Jesse became a nationally known name June 10, 1986, when the 16-day-old infant received the transplanted heart of a brain-dead Michigan baby.

Controversy swirled around Jesse from the beginning when Loma Linda University Medical Center rejected him as a transplant candidate, saying that his unwed parents were incapable of providing crucial postoperative medical care.

The baby’s father, Jesse Sepulveda Sr., then a 26-year-old heating and air-conditioning worker, and mother, Deana Binkley, 17, asked the Sepulveda family priest to intervene.

Loma Linda officials agreed to the transplant only after the priest and the Right to Life League of Southern California marshaled public pressure and the paternal grandparents became Jesse’s official guardians.

The baby’s parents went on the nationally televised “Donahue” show seeking a donor. Bypassing other hopeful transplant recipients, a Michigan couple donated their son’s heart to Jesse.

The 1986 surgery was performed by Dr. Leonard Bailey, who put Loma Linda on the map when he unsuccessfully attempted to transplant a baboon’s heart into a child known as Baby Fae in 1984. Baby Jesse was one of a series of Bailey’s subsequent successes with infant-to-infant transplants.

Jesse fared well after his initial transplant, and the hospital listed him among the 20% of youngsters who experience not a single episode of rejection.

But recently, the 7-year-old fainted, and doctors discovered a side effect that can occur in heart transplant recipients of any age--his arteries were narrowing, indicating a danger of heart attack.

So Jesse underwent the second transplant.

Treating him recently with mechanical circulatory assistance, doctors decided his condition would not permit a third transplant.