A Battle Over Loss, Love and Loyalties

By JOHN L. MITCHELL

Dec. 27, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Evelyn Madden walked into a Hollywood hospital on Sept. 6, 1984, expecting to leave as the proud, 37-year-old single mother of a baby girl she would name Brieana Bethune Jones.

Evelyn could not have imagined that she would never see Brieana grow. Nor that Brieana would be robbed of her limbs and her voice, moving only with a wheelchair, talking only through a computer.

She could not have imagined that her contact with Brieana would be limited to sad moments in convalescent hospitals, in which--to this day--the crippled girl gazes into the face of a woman who has been locked in a coma since she gave birth.

She could not have imagined that her large family, cautioned by their father to be independent and suspicious of outsiders, would wind up chafing resentfully under the microscopes of court-appointed lawyers as they struggled to care for the girl.

Evelyn could not have imagined any of this.

Summer 1997: For her 13th birthday party, Brieana wants something big, the works: a deejay playing her favorite gospel rap music, mouth-watering barbecue, a colorful birthday cake and a place large enough for her family and friends.

A sample pink invitation arrives from the printer. “It’s going to be a Blast!” it reads. No good, Brieana motions to her aunt and primary caretaker, 62-year-old Beulah Crumpton.

“It’s going to be Da Bomb!” the girl spells out through an electronic-voice device.

Brieana nods her head for emphasis, flashing that warm smile, the one that reminds everyone of Evelyn.

Brieana Jones, her Aunt Beulah, two other aunts and an uncle live in a large, well-decorated house in Moreno Valley in Riverside County. Brieana, bright and inquisitive, plays computerized chess and is an avid Laker fan. She’s an above-average student who attends church and participates in teenage retreats.

She is also a spastic quadriplegic, a consequence of a few tragic moments during her birth.

With her head and neck muscles, she can maneuver a motorized wheelchair and paint pictures. She is able to speak by pointing a light strapped to her head at letters and pictures on a “light talker,” a computerized control box with an electronic voice. The computerized words come clumsily for someone with a quick mind; her facial expressions--nods, smiles, eye squints--usually say more.

Aunt Beulah is both Brieana’s court-appointed guardian and the conservator of Evelyn’s estate. Brieana’s father, Gordon Jones, is a horse-racing handicapper who makes a living conducting seminars at racetracks and betting parlors from Las Vegas to Fresno. He broke up with Evelyn before Brieana’s birth, visits his daughter once or twice a year and pays no child support.

Brieana’s financial future appeared to be secured in 1990 when she and her mother received more than $2 million to settle lawsuits against the anesthesiologist and an obstetrician who participated in her delivery.

The money generates enough interest to pay for Brieana’s living expenses and Evelyn’s care in a Pomona nursing home. It bought the $250,000, two-story house with an elevator and ramps in Moreno Valley Ranch.

But questions about whether the family has made inappropriate expenditures are becoming the subject of an increasingly emotional and expensive battle between relatives and an attorney appointed by a Riverside Superior Court judge to monitor Brieana’s estate.

The legal wrangling pits Brieana’s elderly aunts and uncle, who say they have sacrificed their lives for the girl, against a lawyer so distrustful of their spending habits that she accused them outside of court of using Brieana as their “meal ticket.”

It asks difficult questions: Shouldn’t the relatives have to pay rent in a home that Brieana’s money bought? Is Brieana being deprived of her right to her own bedroom because she sleeps in a room with Aunt Beulah--who must wake up two or three times a night to turn the child in her bed? How do you balance society’s duty to make sure relatives do not exploit an innocent crippled child with the right of the family to take care of its own?

There’s an envelope on the kitchen table that Brieana wants everybody to see. The letter contains her first-quarter grades at Mountain View Middle School. “Positive attitude,” one comment reads. “Pleasure to have in class,” says another. Her grades: A in art, A in science, A in language arts, A in history and A in physical education. In math she got a C+.

“How much for each A?” Beulah asks. “Is $2 OK? Well, you better do something about that math grade.”

Brieana’s school day is split between classes she shares with children who are disabled and classes where she is mainstreamed with the general student population.

She has a special assistant, a woman who turns the pages, feeds her at lunchtime and takes her to the bathroom. It’s a full academic schedule, mixed with activities like wheelchair tag and painting.

“She is an inspiration to all the children in the class,” says her history teacher, William Williams.

Ask Brieana what physical skills she wishes she possessed and she tells you instead what she can do with her head that other people can’t.

“I can use a light pointer and not make mistakes,” she says. “I can draw with my head. I write scary stories.”

Aware that her middle name is taken from famed educator Mary McCleod Bethune, Brieana says she wants to be a teacher.

“I want to teach doctors,” she says through her computer. “I want them to know how to deliver babies. I want them to know how to do tr.”

“Tr” is an abbreviation for a word she knows all too well: tracheotomy.

Evelyn Madden awoke that hot September morning in 1984 with deep, penetrating contractions. She knew it was time.

Beulah had spent the sleepless night in Evelyn’s South Pasadena apartment. Now she braided her younger sister’s hair in thick plaits, the way she used to do when they were little. Beulah and her older sisters were always part mother to Evelyn, the youngest of eight. Brieana was to be the last of 26 grandchildren in the Madden clan.

Evelyn’s friend and Lamaze coach, Kiersten Andresen, met them at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Beulah went home to await the good news.

Kiersten and Evelyn had known each other since the mid-1960s when they were both barely out of their teens, working in the same accounting office of the Southern California Gas Co. in Monterey Park.

They were the rebellious ones, wearing miniskirts and other dress-code-breaking attire that radicalized staid, male-dominated offices. They had shared problems, parties and a European vacation.

Labor was slow and painful. Evelyn was not dilating, and her blood pressure was a little high. About 5 that evening, Dr. Harold Peart, Evelyn’s obstetrician, arrived. She was given medication to make the contractions stronger.

“You have to keep pushing,” Kiersten recalls telling her friend. “It’s going to take time.”

What followed would be documented in court depositions and Times interviews with participating physicians:

Evelyn squeezed Kiersten’s hand. The anesthesiologist, Dr. Bang Tran, gave her a local anesthetic--an epidural--that would ease the pain without putting her to sleep.

But hours later, there was not much progress and the pain was again becoming intense. Before midnight, Peart informed Evelyn that he would have to perform a caesarean. She was taken to the delivery room.

“Where is Kiersten? Is Kiersten here?” Evelyn asked anxiously.

“I’m here, I’m right behind you,” Kiersten answered. “Aren’t you excited? We’re going to meet Brieana in just a few minutes.”

In the delivery room, there were four doctors--Peart, another obstetrician, Tran and a pediatrician--and three nurses.

The epidural was not completely effective, so Tran administered a general anesthetic and then began the standard procedure of passing a breathing tube down Evelyn’s throat and into her windpipe to pump oxygen to her lungs.

But the tube would not go down. Tran tried a second time. It still didn’t work--a problem that occasionally occurs, experts say. Time suddenly became the enemy: The general anesthetic was already shutting down Evelyn’s lungs. Her heart rate slowed.

“Oh, my God,” Kiersten thought, watching the doctor change instruments and attempt to reinsert the tube.

“We can retreat,” Peart told Tran, suggesting that it wasn’t too late to abandon the procedure.

But Tran did not retreat. Instead, he urged Peart to give Evelyn a tracheotomy. But Peart had never done one. Precious minutes passed while Peart and the other obstetrician waited for Tran to resolve the problem. Meanwhile, Evelyn and the baby went without oxygen.

Peart said later he didn’t realize that Evelyn was in trouble until her heart rate slowed--and then suddenly stopped. The line on the electronic monitor went flat, signaling cardiac arrest.

Around that moment, Kiersten was ordered to leave the room, but she stayed within earshot.

“Code blue” was signaled, summoning emergency room physicians. Peart began administering CPR. A third doctor attempted to intubate Evelyn. Finally, the head of anesthesiology arrived. The first time he inserted the tube, it wouldn’t go down. Then on the second try, it slipped into place. Evelyn began receiving oxygen; her heart was beating.

Peart began the caesarean, delivering Brieana in two minutes. He cut the umbilical cord. She weighed 8 pounds, 6 ounces.

But the damage was done: A critical five to 10 minutes had passed without Evelyn getting oxygen.

From a hallway where she waited, Kiersten could hear the doctors voice their frustrations. “We have a real mess down here,” she heard one of them say on the phone. “I don’t know what kind of brain she has left,” another said.

The chaos soon was replaced by despair when nurses tried to wake Evelyn 45 minutes after the delivery. She didn’t respond. Her eyes opened and rolled back in her head. Meanwhile, doctors found Brieana’s vital signs to be low: Her color was blue, her muscle tone and motor reactions poor. Her delicate nervous system had been damaged.

Later, doctors would determine that Evelyn suffered hypoxia--oxygen starvation, which can lead to permanent brain damage and even death. She was put on a respirator.

Evelyn’s family and friends, expecting her to die, kept a vigil. They said their goodbyes. “I held her hand and cried,” said Margaret Mitchell, who had thrown Evelyn’s baby shower. “There was no way this woman or her child should have ended up this way.”

The machine was turned off. Evelyn took a deep breath, and then another. The vigil continued into the night. Evelyn refused death. Eventually people went home, hoping for a miracle. None came. Evelyn remained in limbo, her body determined to live, her mind unable to wake up.

Beulah and Brieana have come to the convalescent home to visit Evelyn, who lies in a fetal position.

“Get up from here, girl, so you can come home and handle your business,” Beulah says as if she were ordering her little sister to wake up for breakfast. “I’m sick of these people trying to run our lives.”

“Hello,” Brieana says to her mother through the talking machine.

Brieana eases into the narrow space of her mother’s room. She stares at Evelyn’s face. Evelyn lies on her back, tilted up slightly on the hospital bed. Brieana has no way to touch her.

When Brieana was a baby, Beulah would sometimes lay her on top of her mother’s stomach to simulate an embrace. “She knew Evelyn was her mother,” Beulah recalls. “That’s how she bonded.” The best Brieana can do now is to maneuver her wheelchair to touch her mother’s foot.

Evelyn’s hair is graying, cut short to make it easier for Beulah and the nursing home staff to manage. Brieana settles in to watch a small television.

On the wall is a picture taken of Evelyn in her apartment. She’s wearing a beige suit, black silk blouse, a string of pearls. Her face is framed by bangs that curl to the side. She’s flashing the smile she gave Brieana.

Beulah, distrustful of the nursing staff, runs her fingers through Evelyn’s hair, checks behind her ears and under the folds in her neck. She takes out a toothbrush, toothpaste and a special dry shampoo. She wishes she could braid her sister’s hair the way she used to.

Brieana notices drool from her mother’s lip and frowns. Beulah takes a cloth and wipes Evelyn’s mouth. She puts Vaseline on her lips to keep them from chapping.

As Beulah cleans Evelyn, Brieana rolls down the hall of the nursing home to the lobby, where the room is filled with residents in wheelchairs.

“Hello, Brieana,” an elderly woman says. “Here to see your mother?”

Brieana nods. They talk about art. Brieana says she is making a Snoopy cartoon at school. She entertains the elderly patients with songs from her computerized voice box. Then she goes back to her mother’s room, where Beulah is finishing cleaning Evelyn.

Nothing is on the television. Brieana is restless. Sometimes they bring lunch to the home. This day they didn’t. “I’m hungry,” she says through her machine several times.

They go to a restaurant where Brieana orders enchiladas and 7-Up. Beulah spoon-feeds her and pours the soda into her mouth, remarking that Brieana never could use a straw.

After her birth, Brieana languished for weeks at Los Angeles Childrens Hospital, undergoing tests and suffering seizures. She was fed through a tube until she could be taught to suck from a bottle.

Finally, Beulah was allowed to take her home to Santa Ana, where she was also caring for Irene Madden, Brieana’s ailing grandmother, who suffered from a weak heart and would die a year later.

Brieana cried incessantly. The only thing that seemed to comfort her was being held on her stomach in the arms of someone walking. Doctors prescribed a mild sedative, but it made her lethargic. Relatives stopped the medication and walked the floor with her.

The tragedy made Evelyn’s siblings as emotionally close as they had been growing up in Shawnee, Okla., under the ironfisted rules of their father, David Madden, a minister.

“When my daddy laid down his head at night, he wanted us all to be under the same roof--and we were,” said Florence Madden, 67, one of Evelyn’s sisters who lives in the Moreno Valley home.

Their parents had crammed their children into a black Ford sedan in 1941 and left Oklahoma. They settled for a time in Eloy, Ariz., where the family picked cotton in fields infested with rattlesnakes. They followed their father to Richmond, Calif., where he worked as a welder during World War II. Three sisters--Lorene, Florence and Beulah--married three brothers from the same Bakersfield family, and had 20 children among them.

Evelyn and Angelina, the two youngest sisters, were born in Eloy. By the time Evelyn was a teenager, the family had moved to Santa Ana. Most of her older siblings were out on their own, and her parents were older and less strict. Itching to escape conservative Orange County, she moved to Los Angeles not long after finishing high school and worked at the gas company.

She shared an apartment with girlfriends and club-hopped in the Crenshaw district at night, winning invitations to record-industry parties. She traveled and dreamed of becoming an actress or a model, and enrolled in a finishing school that claimed such graduates as Raquel Welch and Diana Ross.

“She was pretty, but when she smiled she was extraordinary,” recalled Gordon Jones, who met Evelyn at a downtown nightclub on the night she celebrated her 30th birthday.

Jones was 49, the son of William C. Jones, a former president of Whittier College. He had written two small books on racing--”Gordon Jones to Win” and “Smart Money”--and was a reporter and handicapper for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He was charming, and soon he and Evelyn were living together.

Evelyn eventually left the gas company and began working at Columbia Pictures as a secretary, hoping it would lead to acting, writing or a job as a script supervisor. Her relationship with Jones soured after five years. She worried about his gambling.

When Evelyn became pregnant, Jones urged her not to have the baby. He was separated from his wife, and had a teenage daughter from a previous marriage.

Jones ended his relationship with Evelyn before she entered the hospital. He last saw her on Christmas 1984, three months after she delivered Brieana.

Visiting her “wasn’t doing her any good,” he said. “It wasn’t doing me any good.”

His new daughter was a secret he kept from his mother. She would die years later without ever knowing about Evelyn or her granddaughter.

Originally, Jones was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuits filed by the family in 1985 against two of the doctors who delivered Brieana. However, the family’s concerns about his lack of involvement in Brieana’s life and his gambling eventually eased him out of the suits. He lost his job at the Herald Examiner--another consequence of his gambling--and has drifted through life without a permanent residence ever since, making a marginal living--trying, in his words, “to find myself.”

It has been a disappointing day. The Fairplex track in Pomona is still wet from a heavy rain, playing havoc with Gordon Jones’ horse-racing predictions--and the bets of those who had signed up for this day’s seminar. Maybe his luck will change. He’s going to visit Brieana for the first time in a year.

Jones has been in Pomona more than a week conducting his seminars at a restaurant a few yards from the track at the county fairgrounds. As he leaves the track, he is half a mile from where Evelyn lies.

Jones is nervous. He recalls the time he arrived at the Moreno Valley house more than an hour late and found Brieana waiting in her wheelchair on the sidewalk; she had refused to go inside until she’d seen her father’s face.

Today Brieana is at the door when he arrives at 7 p.m., eager to see his face, hear his voice, feel his touch.

Jones is amazed at how much she has grown. “I feel a step behind,” he says, gathering his thoughts. “You look more and more like your mother. I see a little Gordon in you and a lot of Evelyn. Maybe you got the best of both of us.”

He comes with gifts: computer games.

“Look in my bag,” she says. It’s her turn to give him presents. He reaches in and pulls out a soap bar on a rope and cologne.

“She has double the attention of the people in my seminars,” the father jokes.

Brieana tells him of her love of basketball. She wants to meet Shaq. “Nick Van Exel is cute,” she says. “Cynthia Cooper is great” and “Shawn Kemp is a showoff.”

“And what do you think of baseball?” Dad says, switching subjects to one of his favorite sports.

“Baseball sucks,” Brieana says.

She takes him on a tour of her playroom, showing him her stuffed animals and posters featuring Boyz II Men and Michael Jordan in “Space Jam.” She turns to her computer and begins drawing him a picture of a policeman on Mars. The two visit until shortly before midnight. Then Jones leaves. Soon he will be following the horses to the county fair in Fresno. When will he see Brieana again? He’s not sure.

As the lawsuits were proceeding to trial, anesthesiologist Bang Tran settled with the family for $1.2 million. The suit against obstetrician Harold Peart went to court in the fall of 1989.

In many ways, the eight-week trial pitted Tran against Peart. Who was responsible for performing what might have been a lifesaving tracheotomy? Tran testified that he asked Peart to do it; Peart said he had no expertise, and that the issue was outside an obstetrician’s purview. The question, said the family’s attorney, Gary Paul, was “who had control over the windpipe?”

The jury deliberated 11 days before it declared itself deadlocked. Peart’s insurance company agreed to settle the case for $1 million--intending, Peart said, to avoid a second trial.

As Brieana’s guardian and Evelyn’s conservator, Beulah obtained court permission to use the proceeds to purchase annuities that would generate payments to cover living costs for the girl and her mother.

Beulah moved into the five-bedroom Moreno Valley home. She figured that instead of paying for caretakers, she would use the most stable resource in her life: her family. Sisters Florence and Lorene would move in.

Beulah would care for Brieana; Florence, who works part-time at Target, would do the cooking; Lorene, who is retired, would clean, and their brother, Eugene, a former engineer, would do odds and ends, tutoring Brieana and taking care of her computer. The house would be full of children and grandchildren, avoiding the very isolation that plagues so many disabled children.

The law demands more: It requires a court to oversee how a guardian spends a legal judgment that has been awarded to a minor.

As court-required monitors made periodic inspections of the family’s expenditures, they began to ask whether the money was benefiting not just Brieana, but her relatives.

The first court-appointed attorney assigned to oversee the girl’s estate reported to a judge in 1992 that Brieana “radiates happiness . . . the care and love given to Brieana by her guardian and aunts over the past seven years is so valuable that it could not have been purchased at any price.”

Yet the lawyer, Dirk Van Tatenhove, said he was troubled by the fact that the family had spent money on offerings for its church and had paid Angelina to prepare an accounting document.

Beulah appreciated the attorney’s warm comments, but considered his admonitions meddling and was outraged by his $20,000 bill. She paid it, including a note in the envelope: “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.”

Brieana’s current court-appointed attorney, Cheryl D. Thompson, has visited her only once in three years, but her observations have been pointed.

After a September court hearing in Riverside, Thompson criticized the family’s spending habits by referring to Beulah and her siblings outside of court as “Nordstrom’s people.”

Both sides worried that Brieana’s monthly annuity income might be eaten up--in Thompson’s view, by improper expenditures; in Beulah’s, by the family’s mounting attorney fees.

In November, Thompson persuaded Superior Court Judge William H. Sullivan, who is overseeing the case, to cut Beulah’s allowance by $200 a month, to $1,500, and to require relatives living in the house to pay $300 a month rent. At Thompson’s request, the judge also authorized Brieana’s estate to seek child-support payments from both Gordon Jones and the estate of Brieana’s comatose mother. By mid-December, the rent notices began arriving in the mail.

“We’re going to tell that devil to go away!” proclaims Pastor Art Wooten, and many members of his congregation at Friendship Christian Fellowship Church of God in Christ in Moreno Valley, the church Brieana and her family attend each Sunday, know exactly what he means. The devil is the authority that questions the motives of Beulah and Brieana’s other caretakers. How dare they challenge people who “are not motivated by money, but by love of their niece. Money is not the kind of light [in which] this should be looked at.” Brieana, the pastor says, is “not just sitting in a wheelchair, she’s a vital part of the church.”

And with that, as he has done before, he asks her to address the congregation.

There is a roar of applause as Brieana rolls to the front of the church. A bumper sticker on her wheelchair asks: “Got Jesus?”

Her talk, amplified through her light talker, is about jealousy, about the problems teenagers get into when they are envious of others--the fights, the evil deeds. She gets strength, she says, through gospel rap.

“I know it gets hard to live right,” she says. “I’m struggling every day. . . . Jealousy is uncool. Keep praying for me and my mother.”

Beulah Crumpton, who said she left her job as a $20,000-a-year gas inspector at Rockwell International to care full time for her niece, said the monitoring process has made her feel like a “welfare cheat,” leaving her weary and demeaned.

“Just who is benefiting from this?” she said. “Certainly not Brieana. Brieana’s settlement is tantamount to her survival and should not be depleted by court-appointed attorneys. When the money is gone all the attorneys will be gone. Then who will care for Brieana?”

When a judge ordered Beulah to turn over a spare van and an extra light talker so they could be sold and the proceeds added to Brieana’s estate, the aunt refused to part with the backup voice mechanism.

“I’m not going to give up her voice,” she said. Every experience seems to vindicate what she learned as a girl: Nobody really cares about your welfare except family.

Watching over Evelyn and raising Brieana is a 24-hour-a-day job. When Brieana needs to be turned over at night, Beulah is there. The back that grew strong picking cotton in Arizona carries the 65-pound girl from her bed to the bathroom to her wheelchair. Beulah has raised three children of her own, and finds herself at 62 in a job with no end in sight and no options.

“I don’t trust strangers,” she says.

Her fears were warranted, she said, in 1995 when a Val Verde School District bus driver molested Brieana on his bus. The bus driver pleaded guilty to a felony count of sexual battery against a disabled or medically incapacitated person and was sentenced to one year in jail.

Beulah says she sometimes wants to cry out, “Why me, Lord? Why this family?” The answer, she says, is in the Bible’s book of Job. It’s not for her to question.

“Why not me,” she answers.

Brieana’s 13th birthday party was held in the Moreno Valley Ranch development’s beautiful recreation center, packed with more than 75 family members, friends and classmates.

Brieana wore a silk outfit, her hair pulled back. She moved through the party, playing briefly with children and talking to adults.

“Please bless the food,” she asked Pastor Wooten.

Her mother’s friends were there. Kiersten, the Lamaze partner, brought her 15-year-old son. Margaret Mitchell took pictures.

Brieana watched as children played a game. At one point she accidentally smacked a child with her hand, a motion she cannot control. There were tears. She printed out a message: “Sorry, sometimes my body won’t do what my mind tells it to do.”

The moment quickly passed as soon as it was time to sing “Happy Birthday,” blow out the candles and cut the cake. Then they opened presents.

The focus of the attention shifted away from Brieana. The party’s deejay put on another song, one of Brieana’s favorites.

I used to think that I could not go on

and life was nothing but an awful song

But now I know the meaning of true love

I’m leaning on the everlasting arms

She moved her wheelchair onto the empty floor, navigating small circles.

If I can see it

Then I can do it

If I just believe it

There is nothing to it.

Her hands extended out in a moment of expression that almost no one in the room was watching.