Inquest Is Urged After Boy Dies in Foster Care

County social workers said Debra Reid was neglecting her son’s medical needs--the diabetes that required daily doses of insulin and the asthma attacks that sometimes stopped his breathing. And so, armed with a court order and accompanied by four sheriff’s deputies, they took Jonathan Reid wailing from his Gardena home a year ago.

Six weeks after being committed to the county’s care, and just 13 days after he was sent to a foster home, 9-year-old Jonathan was dead.

During his six weeks away from home, Jonathan cried constantly for his mother, Debra Reid said. According to medical records she obtained, he tried to run away from a children’s shelter several times. The last time, he was diagnosed as depressed and suicidal, institutionalized for several days and given an antidepressant.

His life in foster care surely terrified a boy so shy he clung to his mother and rarely stepped off the front porch without her. But it is his death that has created a lingering controversy that Debra Reid and her lawyer, L’tanya Butler, say can only be resolved by a public jury inquest.

“I kept him alive for nine years,” Reid said. “They couldn’t keep him alive for six weeks, and they say I’m the one who’s negligent?”

She will ask a Los Angeles Superior Court judge today to order that inquest under a rarely invoked section of the state government code. Reid says she wants to know how and why Jonathan died in the system entrusted with protecting him, the county’s Department of Children and Family Services.

Attorneys with the county counsel’s office, which is representing the department, said they could not comment on the case.

The case is further complicated, Butler contends, by the actions of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office and its relationship to one of Jonathan’s pediatricians, who is the wife of the chief medical examiner.

Coroner’s spokesman Scott Carrier denied any impropriety or conflict of interest by the office. He said the chief medical examiner and everyone else in the office is limited by confidentiality rules and a Juvenile Court judge’s order from discussing the controversy in detail.

The coroner said in the initial autopsy report that Jonathan died on June 9, 1997, from a lethal dose of asthma medication that must have been given to him by his caretaker. The case was ruled a homicide--a death at the hands of another, which can include deaths caused by accidents or negligence.

Deputy medical examiner Pedro Ortiz wrote in the report that Jonathan died as a result of the “combined effects” of his asthma and a toxic dose of the medication Albuterol.

Three months later, the report and the death certificate were changed by a supervisor.

Christopher Rogers, the coroner’s second in command, amended the autopsy report to list the manner of death as “undetermined.” In his amended report, Rogers questioned whether the toxic levels of Albuterol--several times the amount lethal to adults--found in Jonathan’s heart may have “migrated” there during attempts to save his life.

What the reports do not say is that some of Jonathan’s asthma medication was prescribed by Vijay Lakshmanan, wife of the coroner’s chief medical examiner, Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran.

The pediatrician met the boy at St. Harriet’s Children’s Home, where Jonathan first was placed after being taken from his mother. Medical records obtained by his mother show that Lakshmanan prescribed him an over-the-counter cough syrup, an antibiotic and Proventil, a form of Albuterol.

Her name entered the investigation several months after the autopsy--but before the report was amended. Pomona police brought Jonathan’s medications into the coroner’s office as part of the investigation, Butler said.

Vijay Lakshmanan did not return a call seeking comment.

Butler contends that Sathyavagiswaran and the entire coroner’s office was in conflict of interest when the report was changed. That conflict provides reason enough for an inquest, she added.

“As a public official, he has the obligation to determine the manner of Jonathan’s death,” Butler said. “There’s no way for his office to make that determination without the appearance of impropriety. There’s no way he can expect the public would not believe No. 2 isn’t covering up for No. 1.”

Renowned forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht said Monday that Albuterol should be administered to diabetics with caution. Wecht is routinely called as an expert witness in high-profile cases.

He said the Los Angeles coroner’s office should have referred the Reid autopsy to at least one outside pathologist after learning about Vijay Lakshmanan’s involvement, even if she was just one of many physicians who treated the boy.

“I believe it would have been wise of [the coroner] to reach up to San Francisco or down to Orange County” to avoid the appearance of a conflict, Wecht said.

But Butler said the only response when she advised the coroner’s office of the potential conflict was to issue the new death certificate listing the manner of death as “undetermined.”

Reid and Butler say that county officials are hiding behind laws meant to protect the children in their charge. And they contend in court papers that without the inquest “the cause of Jonathan Reid’s death will forever be tainted with the suggestion of a personally motivated cover-up.”

Meanwhile, lawyers for the county said a Juvenile Court judge, Marilyn Martinez, has asked Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien to close today’s hearing to the public and to keep the court files under seal.

“It’s like letting the criminals seal all the evidence of their crime,” said Reid, who alleges that the family services department abused its authority by taking Jonathan from her, then killed him by negligence.

The relationship between Reid and social workers already was strained when Jonathan entered the foster care system.

She had been fighting to regain custody of Jonathan’s 4-year-old half brother. That child was placed in a foster home when the court intervened during her custody battle with the child’s father.

Reid had also been accused of striking her court-appointed lawyer--a charge that later was dismissed when one of the witnesses recanted his story, she says.

She still faces allegations that she treated social workers with hostility and was uncooperative.