OJAI : Judge’s Ruling Affects Rother Defense

The attorney for an Ojai woman charged with letting her infant daughter starve to death will not be able to blame the tragedy on county social service workers, a judge ruled Thursday.

The decision by Superior Court Judge Allan L. Steele limits the defense’s ability to argue that county officials should have followed up more carefully on reports that Pamela Rother was not caring for her baby properly.

Rachel Catherine Rother was 64 days old when she died of starvation after being deprived of the equivalent of 14 days of nutrition. At the time of her death on Feb. 22, she weighed barely 5 pounds, down from the 6 pounds, 5 ounces she weighed at birth, according to trial testimony.

Pamela Rother, 32, is charged with felony child neglect. She faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

The infant had last been seen by a doctor on Jan. 12, after sheriff’s deputies responded to an anonymous call about Rother’s allegedly erratic behavior and drug abuse.

Dr. Elizabeth Patterson, an emergency room physician at Ojai Valley Hospital, testified that Rachel was on the small side that day but had grown beyond her birth weight and appeared healthy. Patterson also testified that she observed Rother with the infant, and that the defendant cuddled and fed the baby and was otherwise “acting as a mother.”

Under cross-examination, however, Deputy Public Defender Douglas Daily got Patterson to admit that not everything about the visit was normal--for example, Rother said she believed she had delivered twins the day Rachel was born, and she kept the hospital ankle band on her daughter so she could tell the two babies apart.

Rachel was returned to her mother that evening, after interviews were conducted by social service officials and deputies.

The child died 42 days later. Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael K. Frawley told Steele that Rother ate cheeseburgers and kept herself supplied with methamphetamines and cigarettes during those intervening days, while feeding the baby water. Rother was given a three-month supply of baby formula by a friend, Frawley said, but much of it was found later in a trash can.

Daily wanted to argue at the non-jury trial that county officials should have spotted the danger to the child and taken her away from Rother. In his opening statement, Daily said Rother was unable to care for her daughter because the mother herself was “the unfortunate victim of years of neglect, of being beaten down.”

The defense attorney said the social service workers’ “duty to intervene, intercede on behalf of the child, became paramount, more paramount than the mother’s.”

Steele ruled, however, that the behavior of county officials is irrelevant to the issue of whether Rother herself was negligent in failing to feed her child.