A 19-month-old girl held hostage by her father during a gun battle with police had evidence of cocaine in her system when she was accidentally killed by a SWAT officer, a coroner's report released Thursday showed.
Toxicology tests found a trace amount of benzoylecgonine in Suzie Marie Pena's urine, coroner's officials said. The substance is produced when cocaine metabolizes in the body.
The tests showed that the child was exposed to the drug at least the day before her death, said Dr. James K. Ribe, who conducted the autopsy.
Officials said they did not know how the drug entered the child's body. Among the possibilities are that she was in a room where someone was using cocaine, that she ate food that had been contaminated with small amounts of the drug or that she swallowed it in breast milk while nursing, Ribe said.
Police say her father, Jose Raul Pena, 34, who also was killed in the July 10 shootout, had cocaine and a partly empty bottle of tequila in his auto dealership office in Watts during the three-hour standoff.
The girl's death in the gun battle attracted considerable controversy, with some area residents criticizing police for moving in on the auto dealership, rather than continuing to negotiate, as her father continued to fire on officers.
Pena's mother, Lorena Lopez, has said she was breastfeeding Suzie in the days before the child's shooting death. But Lopez's attorney denied she was the source of the drug.
"I can guarantee neither the mother nor the baby used the cocaine," attorney Luis Carrillo said.
Edward Newton, associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at USC's Keck School of Medicine, said the cocaine was most likely ingested accidentally, rather than administered.
He said the drug probably would have entered the child's system up to four days before her death.
"It had to be in the child's system for several hours or more," Norton said.
Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton said police would ask child welfare authorities to investigate who was responsible for the cocaine in the girl's body. The county Department of Children and Family Services was notified of the cocaine finding by Ribe on Tuesday.
"What we will probably end up having to do is notifying the appropriate authorities of that and interview the other children in that family to make a determination of how that occurred," Bratton said in remarks outside Parker Center.
