Alejandro Mendez Vargas with son Lucas in 2002. When the 3-month-old boy died, Centre County prosecutors charged a stunned Alejandro with murder.
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What Killed Baby Lucas?
The law said he died of abuse. Medical science wasn't so sure.
But by the end of day two, she started to smile at his jokes. After the children went to sleep at the hotel, the teacher and the tour guide stayed up for hours, talking. She liked his lighthearted nature, and how children seemed to gravitate toward him.
Later that year and the next, the two flew back and forth to visit each other.
They got married in Pennsylvania in November 2001. The baby was born in May.
They called him Lucas, a name they took from a Latin word for light.
But childbirth was hard on Lisa. It was a natural delivery, and Lucas weighed 91/2 pounds. She had needed a blood transfusion.
She was slow to warm to motherhood. But Alejandro plunged right in, having taken care of a daughter from a previous marriage. Every night, he woke up with Lisa at feeding time to change the diaper and rock the baby back to sleep. At dinner, he couldn't bring himself to put Lucas down; he didn't want him to cry.
"You still have to eat!" his mother-in-law would lecture, watching his food get cold.
"I can hold him and eat," Alejandro would insist.
By three months, Lucas was a robust 16 pounds.
As far as their pediatrician could tell, he was fine.
A vital vitamin
The human circulatory system has an elaborate network for repairing itself - whether from major wounds or from the small internal bleeds that are happening all the time, unnoticed, inside our tiniest blood vessels.
The process involves more than 80 chemical reactions. If you draw it as a flowchart, it looks like a plate of spaghetti.
When an injury occurs, platelets stick to the exposed collagen in a torn vessel wall, forming a loose, temporary plug. The plug must then be held in place with a mesh made from a protein called fibrin.
The production of this mesh depends on four clotting factors, which in turn are dependent on a molecular matchmaker known as vitamin K.
The vitamin attaches a sort of chemical trailer hitch to these clotting factors so they can stick in place and accelerate the production of fibrin, said James Harper, a pediatric hematologist at Children's Hospital in Omaha, Neb. This attachment process takes place in the liver.
Babies are typically given a shot of vitamin K at birth, as Lucas was, and later they get it through their mother's milk or formula. Eventually, bacteria in their intestines can manufacture it.
Yet in Lucas' body, his parents would learn, something had gone badly awry.
Emergency
On the morning of Aug. 27, 2002, Lucas was spitting up more than usual, and acted fussy. Lisa thought he seemed lethargic lately, and he'd had diarrhea.
That afternoon, on Lisa's first day at school, her husband sat the baby in his lap and tried to calm him by playing music on the computer. Then he put Lucas down on a bed to rest, and left the room briefly.
