Mainstream AIDS organizations, medical experts and ethicists, long confounded and distressed by this small but outspoken dissident movement, say Eliza Jane's death crystallizes their fears. The dissenters' message, they say, is not just wrong, it's deadly.
"This was a preventable death," said Dr. James Oleske, a New Jersey physician who never examined Eliza Jane but has treated hundreds of HIV-positive children. "I can tell you without any doubt that, at the outset of her illness, if she was appropriately evaluated, she would have been appropriately treated. She would not have died.
"You can't write a more sad and tragic story," Oleske said.
It is a story not just about Maggiore and her family but about failures among child welfare officials and well-known Los Angeles County doctors.
Among the physicians involved in Eliza Jane's care was Dr. Paul Fleiss, a popular if sometimes unconventional Los Feliz pediatrician who gained some publicity in the 1990s as the father of the notorious Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. He was sentenced to three years' probation for conspiring to shield the profits from his daughter's call-girl ring from the IRS, among other things.
"I don't understand it," Fleiss said of Eliza Jane's death, "because I've never seen her sick or with anything resembling what she supposedly died of.... I don't believe I could have done anything to change this outcome."
Fleiss, who said he could be "convinced either way" on whether HIV causes AIDS, has known the family since before Eliza Jane was born. In 2000, the county Department of Children and Family Services investigated Maggiore and Scovill after a tipster complained that Charlie was in danger because he hadn't been tested for HIV and was breast-fed.
The department found no evidence of neglect, based partly on reassurances from Fleiss, according to an official report reviewed by The Times.
Now, with the death of Eliza Jane, authorities say they are poised to act.
Los Angeles police are investigating the couple for possible child endangerment, said Lt. Dennis Shirey, the officer in charge of the child protection section. DCFS officials say they have opened an investigation to determine whether the parents should be forced to test Charlie, now 8.
Maggiore said that she has spoken with police and expects to meet with the child welfare agency early next week. Scovill would not comment in detail.
