BY JANE PRENDERGAST
The Cincinnati Enquirer
COVINGTON -- Twelve-year-old Kristy is deaf and diabetic. That much, authorities believe.
It's the rest of her symptoms that are in question, the ones that left her taking 16 different medications and eating only through a tube in her stomach.
Prosecutors think her mom was making her sick.
The girl is fine now, off the prescriptions and eating the same way most kids do. But her mother, Sherry Davis, stands accused of criminal abuse in the first degree.
"This is creating illnesses and fabricating symptoms," said Ken Easterling, Kenton County assistant commonwealth's attorney. "All I can believe is there was some type of a need there to fit in with the doctors and nurses. And the poor little kid would have to suffer the treatment."
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP) is a disorder in which parents, most often mothers, fabricate symptoms of health problems in their children, thereby subjecting the children to unnecessary medical tests and procedures. It gets its name from Karl Friedrich von Muenchausen, (sic) an 18th-century German baron whose tales of fighting in the Russian cavalry grew each time he told them.
Some psychiatrists believe MSBP is a disorder rooted in the parent's desire for attention.
Mr. Easterling's description differs in only one way. It's not a mental illness, he says. It's child abuse.
He is preparing a Munchausen case against Ms. Davis, a 32-year-old former gas station attendant indicted last month. The mother pretended to be a registered nurse, he said, and subjected the little girl to dozens of medical procedures she didn't need. He also alleges that Ms. Davis intravenously put sugar into the girl's bloodstream, a dangerous move given Kristy's diabetes.
"This is different than being an overprotective parent," Mr. Easterling said. "Nurses started noticing that things weren't right, and they started tracking her. We went in the house -- it was like a Walgreens (pharmacy)."
Though cases of MSBP are rare, authorities are seeing them more often across the country. But along with the increase in allegations, so too grow the groups of furious parents who say dozens of them have faced unwarranted, costly abuse allegations by health professionals who are only trying to build careers.
Members of a Mississippi group, Mothers Against Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy Allegations (M.A.M.A.), hear MSBP stories daily that they describe as ghastly. Excellent mothers, they say, are being emotionally raped, publicly slandered and jailed for simply being dedicated and desperate parents of chronically ill children. Ms. Davis continues to proclaim her "absolute innocence," court documents say, and "looks forward to the day she will be reunited with her child once she has been cleared of this charge."
She had asked for a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether she's competent to stand trial. As of May, she had lost more than 40 pounds as she sat in the Kenton County Jail, where she was taken after her March arrest. Her attorney at the time, Regina Sheehan, said a psychiatric exam was necessary, saying such a "hunger strike is not something a normal person would endure."
But public defender Linda Smith, who took over the case last month, withdrew that request. The test was not needed, she said in court documents, because Ms. Davis' defense will be that she is not guilty, not that she is at all mentally incompetent.
Cases of MSBP can be difficult to prove, leaving hospitals to sometimes rely on covert videotaping, said Pat Myers, a founder of the child-abuse team at Children's Hospital in Cincinnati. The hospital recorded one known Munchausen death in recent years, she said.
Matthew Peters died in March 1989 when he was almost 4, of heart failure brought on by what doctors later found was long-term overdoses of syrup of Ipecac. His mother, Judi, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and child endangering.
Ms. Meyers and Dr. Robert Shapiro, medical director of the child abuse team and a frequent expert witness in abuse cases, will deliver a presentation on MSBP at a national child abuse and neglect convention this fall in Cincinnati.
Mr. Easterling is working with expert Louisa Lasher, who works in the Division of Family and Children's Services for the state of Georgia. She was chairwoman in 1995 of the first known national conference of Munchausen experts and has consulted in 225 cases. Dr. Mark Dine, a Finneytown pediatrician, identified the first case, in 1964, of a parent deliberately poisoning her child. That case, in the days before current child-abuse laws, was resolved with the child being moved to live with her grandparents while the mother got psychiatric treatment. She fed the daughter tranquilizers in ice cream.
"It's so far against our beliefs and what we believe about our fellow man," he said. "Certainly, if a parent wants to hide something and lie, it can be very easy."
