Word: hoyt
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...Hoyt case is not an isolated instance. In Waukegan, Illinois, this month, Gail Savage, who is accused of smothering her three babies, goes on trial for a child's death. In Garden City, Kansas, last June, Diane Lumbrera was convicted of fatally suffocating her son; she had already pleaded no contest in Texas to killing a daughter. Across the country, authorities are taking a harder look at SIDS deaths. According to medical examiners, police and prosecutors, SIDS is a label that is too readily affixed to mysterious deaths. They say that anywhere from 1% to as many...
...long medical record of these babies being brought barely breathing to hospitals by the parent who says they have a history of turning blue and losing consciousness," explains Dr. Michael Baden, director of the forensic-sciences unit of the New York State police and an expert witness at Hoyt's preliminary hearing. "This isn't the pattern for SIDS, where babies have no serious prior problems and are suddenly dead in their cribs...
...Hoyt escaped suspicion for years. What finally led to her arrest was the two-decades-old medical article in Pediatrics. Fitzpatrick first read the paper eight years ago while preparing an infanticide case in order to familiarize himself with possible causes of SIDS. In the report, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, now president of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Institute in Atlanta, proposed that a genetic defect could cause prolonged apnea, or breaks in breathing during a baby's sleep, and lead to SIDS. He bolstered his thesis with detailed accounts of the death of five babies in one unidentified family. Medical...
Fitzpatrick agreed and began digging. The article referred to the family only as "H." But Fitzpatrick searched county medical records and eventually came up with the Hoyts. Much of the incriminating material in the case comes from the extensive research records kept by Steinschneider. "For Molly and Noah Hoyt," says Fitzpatrick, "we can account for virtually every day of their lives...
Since the Hoyt case and similarly suspicious ones form much of the evidence for Steinschneider's theory that SIDS runs in families, that theory is being called into question, and along with it, the value of so-called apnea monitoring in preventing SIDS. Steinschneider's findings have supported the idea that families who have lost one baby to SIDS can avoid losing subsequent children by hooking up sleeping infants to devices that set off an alarm when the gaps between breaths become too long...