A Boy’s Fatal Journey in the System

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Thursday unsealed hundreds of pages of court documents that in part tell the story of 9-year-old Jonathan Reid’s controversial--and ultimately fatal--journey through the county’s child welfare system.

The file, which had been ordered sealed by a commissioner in Juvenile Dependency Court, details the actions taken by the county coroner’s office, the district attorney’s office and other public officials in the wake of the boy’s death. Jonathan died during an asthma attack July 9--just two weeks after placement in a foster home in Pomona.

Jonathan was taken from his mother after county officials alleged that she was neglecting his medical needs. But within six weeks of being put under the care of the county and just 13 days after entering a foster home, the boy was dead.

The death originally was ruled a homicide, but later the finding was changed to an “undetermined” cause of death. The change occurred in late December, after it was learned that the wife of the chief medical examiner had treated Jonathan, and had changed at least one of his prescriptions for asthma medication.

The records were sealed, court officials said, because they contained confidential information relating to a child under 18. But, The Times’ lawyers successfully argued, “the only goal served by continued secrecy is to obscure the actions of public officials.”

Other records obtained by The Times also raise questions about whether the boy should have been taken from his home. Even county officials were divided on the question of whether Jonathan should have been separated from his mother.

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In Juvenile Court records, some of the social workers describe the boy’s mother, Debra Reid, 40, as a “loudmouth” and as aggressive and emotionally volatile.

But she also had her defenders in the system. Douglas Hunter, a court-appointed attorney for Jonathan’s younger brother, recommended that the boys return home. He summed up the situation this way:

“Her behavior may be in your face, but I believe rightfully so, given what she’s been through,” he said at one hearing. “I think she was taking as good care as she could.”

The records revealed the high level of suspicion with which Debra Reid and the county’s social workers regarded each other. That mutual dislike appears to have fueled an emotion-packed bureaucratic and legal standoff with tragic consequences.

According to the juvenile records, most of the allegations that social workers lodged against Reid were dismissed or found to be unsubstantiated after a series of hearings from November through January.

During those hearings, transcripts show, the county’s witnesses gave contradictory testimony. One witness, an attorney who claimed he saw Reid attack her lawyer outside court, later recanted his story.

Another witness testified that Reid was uncooperative in giving the county an asthma dispenser. But later, the witness conceded that she never asked whether any other family members were asthmatic and needed the machine.

Commissioner Marilyn Kading Martinez ruled in January--more than six months after Jonathan’s death--that there was no evidence to support these allegations made by the social workers: that Reid had refused to provide information to doctors and other health care providers, that she did not cooperate with the family services department, and that she assaulted her court-appointed attorney.

Martinez did sustain one allegation--that Reid was suspicious of and hostile toward social workers.

“When she is offered a helping hand, she perceives hostile thorns,” Martinez observed.

But L’tanya Butler, Reid’s former attorney, asserted in court papers, “A family has been damaged and destroyed for no legitimate reason. . . . There is no single allegation against Ms. Reid which was substantiated.”

The court records show that a call from a doctor at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center to a child abuse hotline was placed at a county social worker’s urging--after Jonathan had been taken from his home. The doctor’s allegation--that Reid failed to keep a follow-up appointment after an emergency room visit--appears to be meaningless because the boy was under the care of his primary physician.

Ticking off the names of lawyers and county employees who she claims lied during the hearing, Butler added, “With the fabric woven of the lies these individuals told, a family’s dreams and hopes were strangled. Nothing can remedy the horrible injustices done to this family. . . . But still, justice demands that this travesty end.”

Records show that Jonathan was taken from his home while social workers investigated his mother for neglecting his medical needs. He was asthmatic and recently had been found to have diabetes.

They claimed that Reid was neglectful--yet at the same time they complained that she called constantly to harass them and to summon assistance by calling 911. One doctor suggested that she suffered from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy--a malady in which a parent fakes a child’s illness to gain attention.

But the one undeniable fact about the case is that Jonathan died while the county was supposed to be looking after him. The exact cause of his death may now be difficult to determine.

Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien turned down Reid’s request for a coroner’s inquest. “No law enforcement official has requested an inquest,” O’Brien wrote in the case register. The law does not allow for requests made by private citizens. Since September, the district attorney’s office has been investigating Jonathan’s death. The office did not see the need for an inquest.

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Records unsealed in Superior Court showed that the county coroner’s office performed an autopsy after receiving a request from the county counsel’s office. The attorney is attached to the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, and had been involved in other aspects of the Reid case.

The coroner revised its autopsy report twice. The first was to correct a mistaken cause of death--from thermal and traumatic injuries to asthma and a toxic overdose of a medication. The second was to change the manner of the boy’s death from homicide to “undetermined.”

The change occurred, the coroner’s office acknowledged, after officials learned that pediatrician Vijay Lakshmanan, wife of the chief medical examiner, was among the physicians who treated Reid in foster care.

Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran removed himself from the case and assigned it to his second-in-command, Christopher Rogers.

Rogers said he briefly considered calling in an outside pathologist but decided against it, the court records show.

Butler, then Reid’s attorney, criticized Lakshmanan’s care in court pleadings, and the county offered no argument in its court filings.

The chief criticism: Although the court ordered Jonathan removed from his home because of his medical needs, Lakshmanan asserted that he had no special medical needs in certifying him for admission to a general care facility, St. Harriet’s Children’s Shelter.

She also changed his asthma medication, apparently without examining him or asking about his medical history.

Jonathan repeatedly tried to run away. After one attempt, he jumped from a social worker’s car as he was being driven back to St. Harriet’s. His action was called a suicide attempt and he was institutionalized for several days and given an antidepressant.

After a few days, he was placed in the foster home, where he died.