Mother Maintains Innocence in Girl’s Starving Death

When doctors said she could end life support for her severely disabled newborn girl, Katrina Gentry refused.

When specialists recommended that young Lindsay be permanently institutionalized, Gentry forcefully declined to be separated from her daughter.

She was told Lindsay would never walk unassisted, but by age 6, the girl was doing exactly that.

Gentry has no regrets about bringing her deformed baby home from the hospital 19 years ago, nor about how she and her husband raised the child they now stand convicted of starving to death through abuse and neglect.

Faced with prison, Gentry, in a jailhouse interview, insisted she did nothing wrong, and said her conscience is clear.

“Maybe we made mistakes, but when you have a child . . . they fall down, they have a disease, you do the best you can,” Gentry said. “When you’re given a child, you don’t have a handbook on how to raise ‘em. You do what you think is right.”

She said she doesn’t believe that another couple with a child such as Lindsay--mentally disabled, with a crooked spine, with cataracts so severe she went blind, with a club foot that made her fall when she walked--could have done better.

At a retrial earlier this year, a Van Nuys jury found the Gentrys guilty of involuntary manslaughter, child abuse and conspiracy in the 1996 death of Lindsay, who stood 4 feet 6 and weighed 44 pounds when she died at age 15.

Gentry attributed the result to an overly zealous prosecutor, jurors who did not understand parenting or Lindsay’s disease, a vendetta by teachers who testified they had repeatedly warned that Lindsay was malnourished and that they suspected abuse and doctors who failed to correctly advise her on what to do about Lindsay’s weight.

‘I Know We’re Innocent’

Sitting in a wheelchair in a secured glass booth, Gentry was interviewed for the first time last week, over the course of 90 minutes, in the main Los Angeles County jail. Her husband Michael, through his lawyer, declined to be interviewed.

Through speakerphones, the 46-year-old woman offered sometimes cheerful, sometimes tearful memories of her daughter, and flashes of anger at all those she believes are responsible for punishing her and her husband for crimes she insists they did not commit.

“I know we’re innocent,” she said. “I don’t know why we were prosecuted.”

Lindsay was born clinically dead, Gentry said. The wisp of a baby girl was on a respirator for 10 weeks before she could breathe on her own.

The Gentrys learned that Lindsay had congenital myotonic dystrophy, a debilitating, muscle-wasting disease similar to muscular dystrophy. Knowing that it is inherited, doctors then diagnosed a milder form of the same illness in the mother, who now has trouble walking because of it.

She and her husband were repeatedly advised by doctors that they could “pull the plug” on the severely disabled infant, but they refused, Gentry said.

“We told them no because we wanted to give her every opportunity to survive,” Gentry said. “If I had pulled the plug when she was born, I would have wondered for the rest of my life . . . what she would be like.”

Doctors also suggested institutionalizing Lindsay, Gentry said. Again, she and her husband refused.

“She was our child,” she said. “We wanted to take care of our child.”

Doctors didn’t expect the fragile girl to live past age 3, and the mother beamed with pride recalling how she proved them wrong. Specialists said Lindsay would never walk without a walker, cane or someone at her side to support her.

“She walked unaided after 6 years of age,” Gentry said.

The couple taught the girl to skate, helped her learn to read Braille, arranged for eye surgery so she could see better and even sent the teenage Lindsay--who had the cognitive skills of a 6-year-old--to charm school.

“Everything a normal child had, she had too,” Gentry said. “She had limitations, but we tried to treat her as normally as possible.”

Born-again Christians, Gentry and her husband took Lindsay to church every week, and they believed in raising the girl to be as self-sufficient as possible.

“We didn’t want her to be dependent on someone else,” Gentry said. “Do you know how terrible it is to have someone aid you everywhere?”

But at the retrial, school employees provided damning testimony against the parents. Stick-thin Lindsay often seemed hungry and underfed when she came to class. Teachers felt so sorry for the girl they gave her extra food, but said the Gentrys told them to stop.

School employees also testified they found bruises, a black eye and a bloody nose on Lindsay, and that she told them her daddy had hit her. Through the years, they filed at least 15 child abuse complaints with child welfare agencies in Orange County, where the Gentrys once lived, and Los Angeles County, but all were eventually closed as unsubstantiated or unfounded.

A Lack of Understanding

During the retrial, experts for the prosecution established that the girl died of malnutrition, not the disease.

Gentry remains angry at the many doctors who treated Lindsay--doctors she said expressed little concern about the girl’s weight until it was too late, doctors even the judge blamed, after the retrial concluded, for contributing to Lindsay’s death.

“I trusted the doctors and they didn’t do their job,” Gentry said.

Gentry said she was perplexed by why Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathleen Cady persisted in her prosecutorial efforts, even after her first trial in 1999 fizzled with a hung jury that voted 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal for second-degree murder and 7 to 5 in favor of conviction for child abuse.

Gentry had bad feelings about the jury for the second trial, she said, because several jurors did not have children of their own and so could not understand what it was like to be a parent, much less what it was like to care for a disabled child.

As for Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John S. Fisher, who presided over both trials and in the end followed probation reports that recommended prison time for the couple, Gentry said, “I thought surely he’d give us time served, but it’s an election year.” (According to the county clerk’s office, Fisher’s term does not expire until 2002.)

Lindsay’s death certificate included both myotonic dystrophy and malnutrition as causes of her death. During the retrial, the Gentrys’ attorneys unsuccessfully argued that Lindsay’s disease was what caused the girl to appear emaciated and ultimately, to die.

“I just hope people will wake up and know that myotonic dystrophy is a fatal disease,” Gentry said, blaming her plight, in the end, on people’s misunderstanding of the illness. “One day, it’s going to kill me.”

One Last Regret

If there is one thing Gentry would have done differently, she said, it would have been how she followed her husband’s example before the retrial. He emphatically denied any wrongdoing, so she agreed with him to rebuff several deals offered by prosecutors.

The last offer would have set them free if they had admitted child abuse.

Michael Gentry is now serving a six-year prison sentence, and Katrina Gentry is awaiting her transfer to prison for her four-year term. With good behavior and the 15 months they have already served, Katrina Gentry said she expects to go free in nine months, and her husband to be released in less than two years.