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a little girl died and investigators didn't know why or how was it an accident was it an unexplained
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illness or was she murdered scientists would go halfway around the world before finding the answer in two
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unlikely places a shredded legal document and her mother's signature [Music]
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[Music] in the spring of 2000 a two and a half year old girl was in the intensive care
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unit of a new hampshire hospital fighting for her life in the very beginning no one knew that
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she had anything more than a bad cold but then she went downhill so dramatically
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her name was sunday abec and her story was unlike any other in the hospital [Applause]
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sunday was from the sudan where a bloody civil war was claiming thousands of lives
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she and her family were lucky to be alive she had to flee because of violence in
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her area her father was a political prisoner in sudan and that may have been more dangerous for her
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family to remain in the sudan because of that my yeah people were being killed didn't matter what side you were on we
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had to leave shortly after sunday was born the family fled to a refugee camp in egypt
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after two years a missionary group was able to get them to a small apartment in manchester new hampshire
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no one in the family spoke english the change from their life in africa was enormous it must have been a culture
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shock this is an old mill city in new hampshire big mill buildings and whatnot much colder weather but this family
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moved in and started to prepare a better life a safer life they thought at least their kids could
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be raised without getting shot at the family had been in the u.s for just a little more than a month when one day
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for no apparent reason sunday started vomiting she ran a high fever and she became delirious
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her mother was sleeping on the hospital floor in sunday's room she would sit and
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hold the child in her arms and that was her main concern was that sunday was sick
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and she had to get her better at first doctors thought sunday had contracted a bad case of the flu
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but none of their treatments worked and they were unsure what was wrong with her
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sunday's initial symptoms were high fever and vomiting and that could be anything that could be virus that could
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be all kinds of problems i didn't know what the problem was the doctors didn't know
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they couldn't tell me what happened despite a battery of tests the cause of sunday's illness couldn't be determined
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none of her siblings or her mother had gotten sick three days after she was admitted to the
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hospital sunday's temperature soared and her brain swelled uncontrollably she went into a coma
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and died when you have children god gives them to you and he can take them when sunday died i tried to remember
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that god gave her to us and now he wanted her back for sunday's family the promise of a
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peaceful life in america had turned into an unspeakable tragedy the mother's lawyer said that she had
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told him that she had any idea this could have happened she never would have moved her family to the united states
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but of course she she couldn't have known she knew she was moving them away from a danger she just had no way of
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knowing she was moving them into another danger soon an investigation was mounted to
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find out how it happened and what it uncovered was not an illness but a crime during a spring snowstorm in 2000 two
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and a half year old sunday abec was laid to rest thousands of miles from her native sudan
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i'll never forget the women in the group wearing their african clothes and wool
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hats and gloves and they were singing african prayers as the snow came down they probably
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never saw snow before and the whole scene to me was just one of the saddest things
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after two years on the run the family thought they had finally found a safe haven in america but they were wrong
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they had come here trying to have a better life for their daughter and they end up burying her in the snowstorm in
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new hampshire and that led to an intriguing story how did this come to pass investigators thought poisoning might be
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a possibility whenever there's an unexplained death of a child i think the police first suspect
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is always a family member sandy's mother was questioned but she had no apparent motive she was asked if
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one of the siblings could have done it hello [Music] in africa a child cannot poison her
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sister or her brother or even me they wouldn't know how did not come from the family
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africa was it possible one of the neighbors perhaps resentful over the influx of
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refugees into the neighborhood was responsible and our apartment complex was another
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family from sudan before my child got sick so did theirs but he recovered he didn't die
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but a severe flu caused that child's illness new hampshire officials couldn't
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determine how sunday died and this raised alarms one of their initial concerns was to
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make sure there was not the importation in the u.s of some exotic disease that could have been transmitted by sunday or
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her family into the u.s all members of the family were thoroughly tested everyone was perfectly
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healthy but then results came back from an extensive test on sunday's blood analysts were shocked by what they found
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her blood contained unusually large amounts of lead 392 micrograms per deciliter 40 times
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the lethal level for a child high level for us might be 50 or 60. i think we may have even had a 70 or an 80
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over the years that have done inspections but a 392 was just absolutely off the charts for us
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lead kills by attaching itself to red blood cells this takes oxygen out of the blood and starves the brain
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sunday's official cause of death was lead poisoning the first such case in the u.s in more than a decade
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the family seemed to be having trouble grasping what had happened one of them said to me you know we don't
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have lead in africa and africa led us bullets they're getting shot at investigators now checked the rest of
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the family to see if they'd also been exposed to lead the tests showed they were all within
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normal levels there was something unique to sunday it wasn't something that they had commonly
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all been exposed to that created this horrific problem for all of the family how could a killer dose of lead have
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gotten into sunday's system while the rest of the family was unaffected their apartment building was locked down
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in a search for answers [Music] paint the most common source of lead poisoning was tested with a portable
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x-ray analyzer it uses a radiation source to basically excite the lead atoms in the paint and then it actually
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sends x-rays back into the machine minor amounts of lead were found in the paint not unusual in an old building and
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not nearly enough to kill someone now investigators moved on to the water the air the cooking utensils and toys
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everything in the apartment was tested we select an area of the home and mark off a square foot and actually wipe it
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with a sterile wipe and collect the dust and put it in a sterile container and that's analyzed to see what the dust
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level in the home the contents of the wipes were dissolved in hydrochloric acid [Music]
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in a process called atomic absorption the solution was exposed to temperatures of more than 3000 degrees fahrenheit it
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burns the sample in the flame much like an acetylene torch and the instrument is set up to see only
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lead no abnormal levels were found nothing in the building could produce a dose of lead large enough to kill
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and i walked back to the office and said i don't think it's the house or
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something else going on extensive testing provided no clues as to how little sunday abec was exposed to
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a lethal dose of lead lead has been known as a hazard for 2000 years lead was one of the
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uh first occupational diseases identified by the romans and even the greeks many many
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years ago so it's not a new issue while investigators couldn't rule out an
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intentional poisoning by someone in the u.s they had to consider the possibility
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that sunday was poisoned before she got to america perhaps in the refugee camp they even brought in the health
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department in egypt and they sampled the formula that the little children were giving because if something was
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contaminated in the formula that could affect thousands of kids food air water and soil in the camp were
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tested everything was negative it seemed the question of how sunday had been killed might never be answered
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there was this mystery what had happened to her and why investigators now turn back to sunday
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herself since lead is a poison the body goes to great lengths to expel it deposits build up in the nails and hair
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the average person's hair grows about a half inch per month sunday's hair was an inch long
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and provided a wealth of information she had spent a month in the united states and before that she had been in
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egypt so by taking her hair and looking at it specifically for lead content and dividing it in half so that we had
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the half inch that grew in the united states and the half inch that grew before that
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we were able to make a comparison and time her exposure the hair was bombarded with radioactive
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[Music] neutrons this caused different elements in the sample to react in unique ways
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the tip of sandy's hair had trace amounts of lead but the base the part closest to the scalp showed massive
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amounts what that tells me is in the united states she got exposed to a pretty significant amount of lead
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and that her level before that wasn't abnormal so her exposure was in this country it wasn't back in egypt
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investigators must have overlooked something but they didn't know what they went full circle they went back to
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manchester and they started saying what did we miss they questioned sunday's mother again
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and were told something they had not heard before sunday spent a lot of time on the front
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porch of their apartment building i knew always that the cause of sunday's sickness had something to do with the
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apartment they were able to ascertain that the child did in fact spend time playing on
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the porch and the mother had seen the child pick up pick at the paint on the porch
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the porch of the apartment was in bad shape the paint was old and peeling suddenly investigators thought they'd
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solved the mystery it looked to be a phenomenon called pica the word comes from the latin name for magpie
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a bird that eats almost anything pica is a condition particularly of children but not always of children it's
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sort of a craving for food items to eat lead paint often tastes sweet so here's
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a little malnourished girl who's never had enough food and it became pretty clear she was probably picking up chips
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of paint and sucking on them or chewing on them samples of paint from the porch showed
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levels of lead 37 times the legal limit to see if it was this paint that killed sunday
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investigators brought in the centers for disease control the samples were dissolved in nitric
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acid and then heated so the isotopes or chemical signature of the lead would be exposed
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we can run the sample of analysis for the child's blood and compare that to the different
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potential sources that she was exposed to and then plot that out and we can either
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identify or exclude various sources the isotopes from the paint on the porch and
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from sunday's blood were identical this test left no doubt sandy avec got a lethal dose of lead by
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eating the paint on the front porch of her apartment building but the case was far from over
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investigators soon found evidence that someone knew sunday was in danger all along
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and mounted an elaborate cover-up to keep that knowledge from her family and police
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a year-long forensic investigation proved without a doubt what killed little sunday abec we concluded that
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lead paint and dust in the environment of her apartment in manchester was the principal source of her lead
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poisoning property records showed the rental agent for the apartment building james annex
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dean had been informed that his building did not meet current standards for lead
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safety by law he had to let his tenants know this landlords and property managers who
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lease buildings constructed prior to 1977 they are required to provide general lead paint warning notices
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to prove that they had been informed tenants must sign these disclosure documents
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the landlord provided photocopies of these documents and signed an affidavit saying they were legitimate
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investigators weren't so sure the tenants advised us that they had not signed those documents we looked at the
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signatures on those documents and were actually looking at them to see if they were forged
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document experts compared signatures from the documents to known signatures of the tenants
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the signatures were exact matches he was too good at it actually because the signatures were too much alike if he
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had varied them in some way it would have been a much more difficult case to resolve
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the signatures weren't forgeries they were duplicates of signatures from other documents the tenants had signed
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the signatures are what we determined to be a layover they were an exact replica
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of an authentic signature which indicates to us that it was placed there by some other means and was fraudulent
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one of these signatures stood out it was from sunday's mother mary allaroot in the document provided by the landlord
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her name was spelled out but at the time mary could barely write english she was
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still signing her name with an ex though she was undergoing training by a church-sponsored teacher to learn how to
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read and write and speak the english language it was readily apparent to non-handwriting forensic examiners
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that this was indeed not her signature investigators raided the landlord's office
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in the bottom of a trash can they found more than 60 torn scraps of paper the secret service reconstructed that
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document for is finding all but one of the 60-something pieces when the pieces were reassembled
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investigators found the original forgery of mary allaroot signature identical to the one on the lead
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disclosure notice he forged the signature of sunday abec's mother on the lead paint disclosure form
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he copied it and produced copies to the environmental protection agency and the grand jury
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the landlord's fingerprints were on the document mary allaroots were not it's very unlikely that she had handled
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or had anything to do with that particular document investigators say that when annex dean
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found out about sunday's death he knew he was potentially liable so he took his tenant signatures copied
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them from other documents and then placed them back onto the lead disclosure agreements
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[Music] his biggest mistake was forging the signature of sunday's mother apparently
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he was unaware how she signed her name so it was clear this was not her signature
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if i were to grade his attempts here at forgery he'd probably be about about a d
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when faced with the evidence james annex dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and failing to
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notify his tenants that they were living in unsafe conditions what motivated him
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and what motivates all of our criminals in this arena it's all about money i
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want to save it and at what cost i think the cost in this one was real high not to him to her
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repainting the porch would have cost just a few hundred dollars and would have saved sandy's life
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her family won a 700 000 civil award against annex dean and his real estate company he was sentenced to 15 months in
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prison and fined 40 000 his was the first ever conviction in the u.s for failure to notify about the
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presence of lead he dug himself a real deep hole and got hit with a big penalty and i think the epa hoped that sent an
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alarm across the country so other landlords don't take part in similar activities
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i was happy he got punished he was lying i never signed those papers he lied and
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it was right that he was punished sandy's family has relocated to tennessee they're still adjusting to life in
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america and the aftermath of sunday's death meanwhile sunday lies in an unmarked
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grave in a new hampshire cemetery hundreds of miles from her family thousands of miles from home her death
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could easily have been avoided but thanks to the forensic analysis it's far less likely
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another family will suffer the same tragedy her death couldn't have been solved
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without forensics the work in the lab is what solved this case and uh and it happened at the federal state and
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local level took a lot of technicians to study this material and figure out exactly what happened and they did which
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is gratifying i'm sure [Music] [Music] [Music] you