NILES Expert helped convict mother in N.Y.

The Minnesota pathologist is one of a few who specialize in child deaths, prosecutors say.
By DENISE DICK
and PEGGY SINKOVICH
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
NILES -- The pediatric forensic pathologist who is an expert witness in the case of a Niles woman accused of killing her children participated in an investigation that led to a 1995 conviction in a similar case in New York.
Gloria Greenfield, 52, of Robbins Avenue, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder. She is accused of killing her three infant children, Melissa in 1969, Theodore II in 1970 and Regina Woods in 1971. The deaths initially were attributed to sudden infant death syndrome.
Dr. Janice Ophoven, a pediatric forensic pathologist from Minnesota, will testify for the prosecution. Prosecutors say she is one of a few experts in pediatric forensic pathology.
Ophoven was involved in a 1990s investigation of Waneta Hoyt, who was convicted in New York of killing her five children. SIDS had been ruled the causes of the deaths of those children as well.
What caused deaths: The Trumbull County coroner's office changed the causes of death in the local case -- Regina and Theodore's are now being attributed to asphyxia and Melissa's is listed as undetermined.
All three have been ruled homicides.
Greenfield also is charged with two counts of assault with intent to kill, accused of trying to kill another daughter, Gloria Bennight, when Bennight was 44 days old and again when she was 80 days old.
If convicted, Greenfield could be sentenced to life in prison.
Prosecutors have been silent about what led to the investigation.
How probe began: Bennight has said she called the coroner's office anonymously in June 2000, trying to obtain copies of her siblings' autopsy reports. She said she was curious but not suspicious.
She didn't think she would be able to obtain the copies and she dropped the effort. She said Niles police knocked on her door in September, informing her about the investigation of her mother.
According to the 1969 coroner's verdict on Melissa Woods' death, the infant turned blue and was brought to the hospital. The coroner's verdicts for the deaths of Theodore II and Regina Woods show that the babies had blood on or inside their noses when they died.
The deaths of the Hoyt children were a basis for information in a 1972 medical journal demonstrating how SIDS can run in families.
The children's pediatrician wrote in the journal that a genetic defect caused extended breaks in breathing in infants while they sleep and used the Hoyt family as an example.
The same doctor, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, marketed a device to monitor children's breathing.
In 1992, the district attorney in the New York county where the Hoyts lived opened an investigation into the deaths of the children. Hoyt confessed during an interrogation, saying she had suffocated the children with a pillow, a towel or against her shoulder.
She later recanted the confession, but was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to life in prison. She died of cancer in prison in 1998.
The Hoyt case is the subject of a 1997 book "The Death of Innocents," by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan.
SIDS organizations still cite the death of a sibling from SIDS as a risk factor for an infant, but studies subsequent to the 1972 article refute that contention.
Statistics in study: One study published in 1997 in Pediatrics, the same medical journal that published the 1972 article, concluded that 5 percent to 10 percent of infants believed to be victims of SIDS actually were victims of infanticide.
In the Hoyt case, the infants' deaths were preceded by many visits to the doctor. Prosecutors in that case attributed it to Manchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a condition in which parents or caregivers make their children ill or hurt them as a means of seeking attention for themselves.
Bennight said in an interview last month that she wasn't sick a lot as a child and didn't make frequent visits to the doctor.
Atty. Anthony Consoldane of the Ohio Public Defender's Commission, who represents Greenfield, says his client is innocent.
"This is nothing more than a witch hunt," he said. "They, the prosecutors, are now going to go after SIDS cases."
Greenfield and several members of her family, including one daughter, say she is innocent.
Greenfield, who wears a mother's ring with the birthstones of all her children, says she mourns her children's deaths.
"I didn't do this. I wouldn't hurt a child," she said.