Clinic Official’s Murder Trial Begins : Courts: Prosecutor says administrator tried to cover up patient’s death. Victim died before abortion was performed and autopsy was botched, defense counters.

An abortion clinic administrator on trial for murder had a “monetary motive” when she began performing the risky procedures without medical training and then tried to cover up the January, 1993, death of a young patient, a prosecutor said Monday.

A defense attorney for Alicia Hanna, 32, agreed with some of the prosecution’s allegations but denied that Hanna was guilty of murder, saying the victim died before an abortion was performed and a botched autopsy has concealed the true cause of the woman’s death.

Angela Nieto Sanchez, 27, of Orange died Jan. 19, 1993, after going to Hanna’s Bristol Street clinic for an abortion. Sanchez began vomiting and foaming at the mouth, after Hanna injected her with an unknown drug, yet Hanna refused to let an assistant call 911, prosecutor Rick King told an Orange County Superior Court jury during opening statements.

“The defendant said, ‘No, I’ll save her--we’ll get in trouble,’ ” and hung up the phone, said King, who depicted Hanna as a financially ailing businesswoman looking to make fast money.

“The defendant made a conscious choice to cut out the middle man--the doctors--and the defendant decided to perform abortions on her own,” King said.

Hanna is charged with murder in Sanchez’s death and with performing or attempting to perform abortions on two other women in the fall of 1992, even though she is not licensed to do so, King said. In one of those cases, the procedure did not work--a fact the woman did not learn until several weeks later, King said.

Deputy Public Defender Steve Biskar told jurors his client was only performing illegal abortions to help desperate, impoverished women who believed they had nowhere else to turn.

The defense attorney also told jurors a “negligent” coroner did not preserve sufficient autopsy specimens for further testing and said the autopsy fails to prove how Hanna died.

“There is no scientific, defined explanation” for Sanchez’s death, said Biskar, who said his client frantically tried to perform CPR and use other measures to save the patient.

Two of Sanchez’s three children were waiting for their mother outside the clinic when she died, King said. Hanna had an assistant tell the boy and girl that their mother had already gone home, and sent the children home with an uncle who came to pick them up, he said.

In the meantime, Hanna was asking friends to help her dump Sanchez’s body and her car in Tijuana, King said.

When Sanchez’s relatives returned to the clinic to find her, they discovered Hanna attempting to hoist the dead woman’s body into the trunk of Sanchez’s car, he said.

Biskar told jurors his client tried to cover up her actions because she was afraid law enforcement officials would discover she was performing illegal abortions at her clinic.

“She panicked and she tried to cover it up,” Biskar said.