Overtaxed System Leaves Child’s Death a Mystery : Little Ranisha Cunningham was found dead--probably abused. But until the coroner can get to her, that’s all her family knows.

Her granddaughter is dead at age 2, and no one will tell her why.

The police refuse to act because they don’t have an official explanation of how the little girl died. The coroner’s office can’t find the time to answer that question because it has been backed up for months. And now the county Board of Supervisors is talking about slashing the coroner’s budget even further.

This is the system as Victoria Green knows it.

Five weeks have passed since Green’s granddaughter, Ranisha Cunningham, stopped breathing in her mother’s South-Central Los Angeles apartment. The little girl, who called Green “Grandma Gigi,” died two months shy of her third birthday. In the course of examining the child, nurses discovered she had suffered trauma consistent with violent sexual abuse--tears, lesions, scarring. Judging from the girl’s scars, the abuse “was old and continual,” according to a police report.

Green, 41, who lives in a rough mid-San Fernando Valley neighborhood, has her suspicions about who killed her granddaughter. But police say they cannot pursue any suspects because authorities have yet to conclude the exact cause of death. More than a month after Ranisha’s death on May 20, the coroner’s office has yet to issue its autopsy report. Without all the facts, police say, their hands are tied.

Grandma Gigi is getting tired of waiting: “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Abuse experts say Ranisha’s case shows how the coroner’s office is already overtaxed. Further cuts to the agency, where 17 medical examiners perform 7,000 autopsies each year, could result in a crisis, they warn.

In the name of preserving the county’s fiscal solvency, the board is debating a plan to pare 20% of services, but has agreed to spare the coroner’s office at least for the moment. During the past four years, funding has dropped to $12 million from $15 million and the office has been forced to defend its reputation in the national spotlight of the O.J. Simpson case.

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Of the 1,811 homicides the agency investigated last year, only 51 were of children under age 9. But probes of child deaths can take weeks longer than those of adults, according to Dr. Eva Heuser, a nationally recognized pediatric pathologist who will retire from the county coroner’s office later this year.

“We really are overburdened, and with child abuse cases, you have to be very meticulous,” said Heuser, who on a recent week had a case dating back to April waiting on her desk. “Because these cases have an aura of being difficult, everyone is super-cautious around them. They want to have everything in before they put anything out. Even when you have an obvious homicide, you hold onto the death certificate before putting it out.” (Heuser said she was unfamiliar with Ranisha’s case and did not perform the autopsy.)

While the county coroner’s office has a solid national reputation, the vast majority of American medical examiners “lack specific training in identifying the cause of a child fatality, and only a handful of medical examiners . . . specialize in autopsies of children,” according to a study released two months ago by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect.

In Los Angeles County, “we have an excellent medical examiner,” said Deanne Tilton Durfee, who chairs an inter-agency task force to prevent abuse and headed the national study. But on a nationwide scale, “until recently, one didn’t even look for sexual abuse in child deaths. Now, as we look for it, we’re finding it.”

Police have declined to arrest anyone on charges of sexually abusing Ranisha and say they are trying not to rush the medical examiner.

“We don’t want them to make a mistake because down the road, it will come out in court,” said Detective Ellen Camarillo of the Los Angeles Police Department’s juvenile division, with a touch of exasperation in her voice. “It all hinges on the coroner.”

“Usually, the cause of death is clear-cut in child deaths,” said Detective David Berglund, who is supervising the investigation. “But we cannot arrest until we know what we have.”

Green, however, has all the facts she needs.

Two weeks before her granddaughter died, Green said, Ranisha told her, “Grandma Gigi, I don’t want to go home.”

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Ranisha’s home was a tiny hovel on West 51st Street where she lived with her mother--Green’s daughter--Angela Green, 18. The grandmother said Ranisha described huddling at night next to her baby sister under a blanket in a corner and complained of being beaten time and again.

On the cold night in May, Ranisha stopped breathing. She was found nude and unconscious on the floor of her mother’s apartment in a state of cardiac arrest. After trying to revive her for more than an hour, doctors at California Hospital Medical Center pronounced the girl dead.

Doctors transferred the body to the coroner’s office to await an autopsy. Los Angeles police detectives questioned relatives and friends living at the home and removed Ranisha’s younger sister, claiming she was “at risk of abuse and neglect,” according to a court petition.

Five weeks later, police have made no arrests. Whoever molested Ranisha, a playful girl who refused to eat without saying grace, is “out there fancy-free,” says Green.

Green has been waging a personal crusade to push the police into arresting a suspect. She calls the two detectives at least once a week. But she and daughter Angela--who has enrolled in parenting classes--are also eager to get on with their lives. They plan to move to Sacramento this month.

“My feelings are just going over the edge,” Green said. “I feel the best thing to do is just get away.”

“She wants justice to prevail,” Berglund said of Green. “But justice can’t prevail without the facts. Unfortunately, it’s not done in a super-timely fashion.”

Ranisha’s mother said that on the morning of her daughter’s death she woke up to the sound of running water. She said her live-in boyfriend had asked Ranisha to take a shower after the child wet herself. Angela Green said she went back to sleep and woke up 30 minutes later to find her boyfriend cradling the little girl, who was wrapped in a blanket, in his arms.

Hours later, after family members took the girl to the emergency room, Angela Green said doctors informed her that Ranisha had died--and that she had been violently abused. But the mother said she was too shocked to point fingers.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “I was just hurt because she was gone.”

Ranisha is the third of Victoria Green’s 18 grandchildren to die. Two boys, Christopher and Trevon, died of pneumonia, each before his first birthday. When Angela became pregnant with her first child, Green told her, “You have a responsibility to take care of this child.”

Nevertheless, after Ranisha was born, Green kept her daughter and her new granddaughter under her own roof. Green said she and Angela agreed that until the new mother ventured out on her own, Ranisha would remain in the care of her grandmother. That day came in late February of this year when Angela moved with her boyfriend to a one-bedroom apartment in South-Central.

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Green said she went inside only once--to help Angela move out, just hours after Ranisha died.

By her grandmother’s account, Ranisha Shanice Cunningham was a quick learner. She was roller skating before she turned 2. She had the alphabet down pat.

Ranisha’s family buried her in a North Hollywood cemetery June 3. Her death certificate lists the cause as “deferred.”

Green still owes the mortuary $211, and said she promised to pay before she moves to Sacramento this month. She is used to picking up her life on short notice. Since eye and ankle injuries nearly crippled her more than a decade ago, Green has performed odd jobs, living everywhere from Ontario to Portland, Ore., to homes up and down California. She said she walked out on her husband 12 years ago after he pistol-whipped her before going to work one morning. Her last steady job was working for a pickle company in Portland 10 years ago. Her monthly income now consists of a welfare check. She said she hopes to find work at the Campbell’s Soup Co. in Sacramento.

Green vowed to attend a court hearing in the case this month. For now, she says, she can only keep the pressure on the police.

The police will press the understaffed coroner’s office for an answer.

Until then, Berglund said, “we’re in limbo.”