Delays Slowed Probe of Baby Food

Irvine police waited 17 days before sending a tampered baby food jar to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department crime lab for forensics testing, and the Food and Drug Administration did not receive it until about a month after its discovery -- and determined it had been contaminated, information supplied by the Sheriff’s Department and the FDA shows.

Irvine Mayor Larry Agran said Police Chief David Maggard notified the City Council on Tuesday that there had been a delay between the discovery of the tampering and the testing of the baby food by the FDA. Agran said he did not know the reason.

“As is the case in any investigation, we will look at how things were handled, and if there was a systemic shortcoming, we will identify it and remedy it,” Agran said.

Maggard said Friday that his investigator on the case told him the first tampered jar was sent to the crime lab a day or two after its discovery May 31. He said he could not tell late Friday when it had been sent to the FDA.

What is clear is that potentially crucial time was lost before it was determined that jars of Gerber’s Banana Yogurt Dessert had been poisoned. The FDA announced Tuesday that the baby food was contaminated with mashed castor bean, which contains trace amounts of the deadly poison ricin, nearly two months after a previous tampering incident.

The district attorney’s office, the lead agency in the investigation, did not answer calls or e-mails.

The first tampering was discovered May 31 after an Irvine couple fed their 9-month-old daughter a couple of spoons of yogurt they had purchased at a Ralphs grocery store in Irvine. They found a cellophane-wrapped note inside the jar that said it had been poisoned and that the person eating it would die. It also implied that an Irvine police officer had planted the note.

A second note was discovered June 16 as an Irvine man was cleaning a baby food jar after feeding his 11-month-old son. There were no contents remaining for testing. Police found a third note in an unopened jar in the family’s pantry. The father had purchased the yogurt from the same Ralphs.

According to sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino, police sent the contaminated jars to the sheriff’s crime lab June 17 -- not within a day or two of the May 31 discovery, as Irvine police said.

Also on June 17, Irvine police spokesman Lt. Jeff Love said “it appears there’s no contamination” because neither baby had gotten sick. He also said the jars had been sent to the FDA and analysis was continuing.

But the Sheriff’s Department said it had the jars in its possession until July 2. Love did not return calls Friday.

Amormino said the Sheriff’s Department returned the jars to Irvine police July 2, after they were tested for DNA and fingerprints. He said the lab does not test for food contamination.

Consistent with that time frame, the FDA lab, which checks for food tampering, received the jars about four weeks after the May 31 incident, said Dan Hansen, assistant special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office.

When asked about the FDA and Sheriff’s Department versions of the events, Gil Geis, an emeritus professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine, said: “They [Irvine police] took too damned long.

“You don’t take these things casually, especially when children are involved and there’s a death threat.”

Said Robert Feliciano, a former Los Angeles police officer who teaches criminal procedure at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, “I cannot understand the logic in waiting three weeks.

“There’s no book that says once you get a contaminated jar, you have to send it to the lab today, but because of the nature of the beast and today’s climate on terrorism, I would have sent it down immediately, and most law enforcement investigators would have sent it immediately,” he said.

Irvine detectives and district attorney’s investigators Thursday questioned a drifter and ex-convict they had been looking for in connection to the case. Love, the Irvine police spokesman, said that 47-year-old Charles Dewey Cage was a witness.

Cage arrived at the Irvine police station with a lawyer after authorities said they were looking for him. Mark Williams said his client didn’t know anything about the case.

Cage worked at another Ralphs in Irvine during the supermarket strike that ended in February.