Doctors in conflict at murder trial

Bill Gang

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 1998 | 11:19 a.m.

It was a day of dueling doctors Tuesday in the murder trial of licensed child-care worker Alica Wegner, with jurors getting a medical school education in traumatic head injuries.

The question for the jury in District Judge Mark Gibbons' courtroom is whether Wegner was responsible for the skull fracture that caused the death of 14-month-old Kierra Harrison on March 3, 1997.

The defense expert, Dr. Barbara Wolf of the Albany, N.Y., County Coroner's Office, testified that slides of brain tissue taken at University Medical Center showed a healing head wound that was at least two days old.

That would indicate the girl was in the custody of her parents over a weekend when the fatal injury occurred.

Kierra was being cared for in Wegner's licensed facility near Twain Avenue and Tenaya Way when police were called and told the infant had hit her head and was unresponsive.

Wolf said there could have been a "re-bleed" of the older injury prompted by a minor fall, or the death may have been the result of a gradual swelling of the brain over the two days between the time of the injury and the girl's collapse at Wegner's home.

Wolf's position was supported by evaluations of slides performed by the Mayo Clinic and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

But prosecution expert Dr. Lucy Rorke, a pediatric neuro-pathologist at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, Pa., said her study of the slides supported law enforcement's contention the fatal injury occurred while Kierra was in Wegner's care.

She said that cells the body uses to carry off injured tissue were not present in the slides, indicating death occurred shortly after the injury.

Rorke testified that the cells generally don't arrive at an injury site for a couple of days and their absence is a critical factor in timing an injury.

She discounted the reports from the Mayo Clinic and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology as mistakes, because the facilities specialize in tumors and not traumatic injuries as she does.

Despite the disagreements over the microscopic evidence, the case may hinge more on testimony from doctors in Las Vegas that the skull fracture was so serious the girl couldn't have been walking around as Wegner said she was.

Deputy District Attorney Vickie Monroe said the skull fracture was about 5 centimeters wide and brain tissue had been draining through the gap.