Family Lodges Claim Against County Over Misplaced Brain : Ventura: The parents of Jamie Burton are seeking $250,000. They contend the coroner’s office was negligent in handling the organ after her 1990 death.

The family of a Ventura girl who died four years ago has filed a $250,000 claim against Ventura County, claiming the coroner’s office misplaced the girl’s brain for months after her death.

In the claim filed earlier this month, David and Jo Burton said the Ventura County coroner’s office failed to forward 17-year-old Jamie Burton’s brain to a medical laboratory at UCLA for testing until four months after she died.

Although not legally responsible for transporting the brain tissue to UCLA, the Burtons said, coroner’s officials said they would ensure that the brain was safely delivered to the university laboratory.

Jamie, who suffered from a mild form of retardation and intermittent seizures, died in August, 1990. The cause of death was listed as positional asphyxiation due to a seizure, the claim said.

After her death, the coroner’s office agreed to send the brain to UCLA for a series of tests to determine if the girl died not from a seizure but from an illness stemming from an unrelated childhood immunization.

“Several months passed with no word of the research,” the Burtons wrote in their letter to the county.

“We were informed that the brain had been misplaced,” the letter continues. “Eventually found, our family arranged for the transport (of the brain) and paid for said transport.”

The Burtons, who declined to comment on the claim Thursday, said in their letter that Ventura County is liable “due to the negligent management of the initial transport of Jamie’s brain to UCLA.”

Included in the claim is a copy of a letter written by then-Coroner F. Warren Lovell, who apologized to the Burtons for his office’s apparent oversight.

Ventura County Risk Manager Robi G. Klein said the claim has not been reviewed by his staff and that he was not prepared Thursday to make a recommendation on whether the Board of Supervisors should approve or deny it.

County Counsel James L. McBride said Thursday that he also has not seen the claim and had no comment.

The Burtons said research subsequently performed on the brain tissue suggests that Jamie did in fact die as a result of the childhood immunization.

They later applied for compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, but a claim to that organization was denied last year, the Burtons wrote in the claim.

If the claim is denied by supervisors when it reaches their agenda, the Burtons could file a lawsuit seeking damages.