D.A.’s Case Rests on These Brief Flickers of Existence

Tucked into a file in the Los Angeles Municipal Court are photocopies of some snapshots that bear witness to a happy event--the birth of Jason Friel on Aug. 30, 1984. They begin with his delivery in the Valencia clinic of Dr. Milos Klvana and end with the smiling parents, Deborah and Edward Friel, getting into their car with the baby. But, early the next morning, Debbie Friel awoke to find Jason had stopped breathing.

His death led to an investigation by law-enforcement agencies that led to five second-degree murder charges and other criminal complaints against Klvana. An assistant, Delores Doyle, is charged in two of those five deaths.

According to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, Jason was one of nine babies (including one fetus) to die under Klvana’s care between December, 1982, and September, 1986. The district attorney announced last week he plans to file charges in connection with the other four deaths at the start of the preliminary hearing Wednesday.

The stories of the five original cases, like the snapshots of Jason Friel’s birth, are contained in the voluminous court file that represents much of the state’s case against Klvana and Doyle.

Amanda Herrera

Born to Julie James and Rudolfo Herrera on Oct. 12, 1983, in Klvana’s Valencia clinic, Amanda Herrera died shortly after birth. In interviews with investigators and in sworn testimony from a subsequent lawsuit, James said she first went into labor Oct. 10, but that her contractions became sporadic. Early on Oct. 12, she went to Klvana’s clinic, where he administered an intravenous drug to speed labor.

“I could feel her kicking me a couple of minutes before delivery,” James told prosecutor Brian R. Kelberg in an interview at her Canyon Country home, a transcript of which was in the court file. After delivery, she said, Klvana told her that the baby’s heart was beating but that she was not breathing.

The baby died 20 minutes after her birth in Klvana’s clinic, James told a state Board of Medical Quality Assurance investigator. James told the investigator that Klvana “wanted to know what we wanted to do with the baby. He said we had a choice. We could leave it here or we could pay. He said, don’t pay for an autopsy because those suckers would charge about $1,500.”

Court records did not indicate if there was an autopsy or what became of the body. James and Herrera won more than $1 million in a civil suit against Klvana, but could not collect because Klvana has no money or insurance.

Baby Ginsberg

A mature fetus was delivered stillborn Jan. 17, 1984, to David and Mira Ginsberg, who lived at the time in Simi Valley. In testimony before a Los Angeles County grand jury last August, Mira Ginsberg said they chose Klvana as their doctor in the belief that “children born at home make happier individuals.”

In 1982, a midwife employed by Klvana had delivered a baby for the Ginsbergs at their home. The midwife consulted with Klvana by telephone several times when the baby had trouble breathing, but Klvana did not recommend that the baby be taken to the hospital, according to the Ginsbergs’ grand jury testimony.

Two hours after its birth, that baby died of respiratory failure. Yet, harboring “no animosity or dissatisfaction,” the couple went back to Klvana when the mother became pregnant six months after their first baby’s death.

This time, Mira Ginsberg felt something was wrong. On Jan. 16, she noted that the baby had stopped kicking. Klvana gave her a checkup and detected no fetal heartbeat. “Well, he was reassuring, and he just said, ‘Sometimes this happens,’ ” she told the grand jury. She said he told her to go home, rest, and come to the office the next morning for a checkup.

The next day, she went into labor in the office and gave birth to a dead fetus. Klvana’s comment was that “it defied logic,” she said. As for the remains of the fetus, she said, “He just said that he would take care of it.”

Klvana allegedly made only one reference to the death in his medical records--in a bill for a three-week postpartum examination. Neither the delivery itself nor any previous visits were ever recorded, according to insurance company records included in the court file. The remains of the fetus were never found, Kelberg said in an interview.

Aaron Diederick

Aaron Diederick was born on Jan. 30, 1984, at Klvana’s Temple City clinic and died on Feb. 7. His parents, Lana and Brian Diederick, both Jehovah’s Witnesses, had originally arranged with Doyle, who is also a member of that church, to deliver the baby at their Garden Grove home, they told Kelberg in an interview that is part of the court file.

But, because of complications and prolonged labor, they moved to the clinic. “I labored for hours and begged for a Caesarean, but Delores told me it would kill the baby, so we all listened to her,” Lana Diederick said in that interview.

She added that Klvana arrived at the clinic an hour after she and her husband did.

The baby was born blue and was not breathing. Klvana and Doyle worked for three hours to revive him. He started breathing on his own, and Klvana said they could take him home. At 6 the next morning, they found him limp and unresponsive. Paramedics took him to one hospital, which later transferred him to Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles, where there is an intensive care unit for newborns. He was found to have irreversible brain damage and finally brain death.

One of the counts of insurance fraud relates to this case. The bill for delivery of a child to the Diedericks was submitted by Klvana to the insurance company with the date of birth given as August, 1983, when the birth did not occur until the following January, according to a variety of documents, including insurance company records, in the court file.

Tyrone Ennis

On May 19, 1984, Kim Ennis, a 19-year-old Compton woman, gave birth to a son named Tyrone at the Temple City clinic. Doyle oversaw the delivery, with Klvana arriving just as the baby did, according to Kim and her husband, Del Ennis, in interviews with Kelberg and a district attorney’s investigator. The baby’s cry “was kind of weak,” Del Ennis said. “It was like he had something caught in his throat.” The baby was covered with “tarry, sticky stuff,” Kim Ennis said, which Doyle described as meconium, fecal matter from the fetus.

She said that Doyle told her, “He’s going to be all right, he just has some stuff in his lungs, and (we’re) just trying to clear it out.” They were using a suction device to clear the baby’s lungs.

Then the baby began to turn blue, the mother said. “The fingers first,” Kim Ennis said in that interview. “And I took off the cover from him and . . . looked at his toes, and they were turning blue.”

In the interview, Kim Ennis said Klvana decided to call a pediatrician. The baby was taken to the pediatrician’s office and finally, after a several-hour delay, to Childrens Hospital, where he died May 26.

The parents, who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, said in the interview with Kelberg and the investigator that they do not blame Klvana. “It seemed like everyone was out to get Dr. Klvana,” Del Ennis said. Speaking of his son, he said, “As far as I’m concerned . . . all he had was a breathing problem when he went into the hospital, and that’s where he died.”

The death did not deter them from trying home birth again. “I feel that, once you’re in a hospital, you have no rights,” Del Ennis said.

When Kim Ennis again became pregnant, they returned to Klvana, but he said he was being investigated and recommended that they go to someone else, she said. The Ennises found another doctor and had their baby at home.

Jason Friel

In 1983, Deborah Friel, 8 1/2 months pregnant, met Klvana when she and her husband, Edward, moved to Saugus from Auburn and sought a doctor for the imminent birth of their child. Klvana successfully delivered that baby at his clinic, according to interviews with Kelberg and Sgt. Michael Lee, a homicide investigator for the Sheriff’s Department.

That November, she was admitted to Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia with influenza-like symptoms that turned out to be the onset of insulin-dependent diabetes. She began taking daily insulin shots. A week after she left the hospital, Klvana gave her a checkup and learned of her diabetes, Friel told the investigators.

In February, 1984, Klvana told her that she was pregnant, with an expected delivery date in early October. At some point during the pregnancy, the Friels told Klvana that they would not be opposed to a hospital birth if necessary for safety, according to the interview with Lee.

Friel started to experience contractions Aug. 29. The next morning she went into labor at Klvana’s office, and Jason was born just after noon.

She said the baby’s hands and feet were a deep purple, and he was listless. His breathing was labored and sounded like someone who was “trying to clear their throat,” she said. Klvana told her there was “really no problem,” and he sent her home, according to the interview with Lee, which is contained in the court file.

The court file also contains photocopies of 22 snapshots taken by a participating unlicensed midwife--who in this case was not Delores Doyle--starting with the delivery and ending with the smiling parents getting into their car with the baby.

At 4:45 the next morning, Friel, who had been sleeping with Jason on her chest, woke to discover that he had stopped breathing. By the time they got to Newhall Hospital, he was dead.

Later that day, after the Friels had returned home from the hospital, Klvana and the midwife came to their house, according to investigators’ interviews with the Friels, included in the court file. Klvana told the Friels that he had “gone out on a limb” to deliver Jason out of the hospital, the Friels said. If anyone asked, the couple told investigators, they were to say that he had wanted to deliver the baby at a hospital but there had not been time.

A review of all of the records in the Friel case was done for the district attorney’s office by Dr. Lester T. Hibbard, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at USC School of Medicine. In his four-page analysis, Hibbard said, “Diabetes is one of the most basic complications in pregnancy. All authorities agree that both the mother and fetus are at high risk. . . .”

The infants are often normal size but premature and routinely require close monitoring, Hibbard said. According to the analysis in the court file, the Friel baby was born in reasonably good condition, Hibbard said. “There is a strong probability he would have survived if given adequate newborn care.

“If Dr. Klvana has any understanding of the practice of obstetrics, and I assume he does, he would know of the greatly increased risks of pregnancy to a diabetic woman and her infant, and that to permit birth outside a hospital setting greatly increases that risk,” he said.