It took months, but in the end, Sara's parents were not charged, and her siblings came home.

For Lisa and Alejandro, the wait would be much longer.

Seeking a fighter

Every day her husband was in jail, Lisa prayed for help. She visited him repeatedly, sometimes with relatives in tow, despairing as she thought of him surrounded by robbers and drug dealers. She flew to Costa Rica to beg officials there for help. She started a "Free Mendez" Web site, and someone made up Free Mendez lapel pins, which family and friends wore to a preliminary hearing.

But she needed more than pins. She needed ammunition, so she began a daily routine of searching the Internet.

Lisa found a California toxicologist who agreed to review the case. He concluded Lucas had died from a variety of factors, including an adverse reaction to vaccines. Prosecutors did not place much stock in his report, nor did Alejandro's attorneys.

One attorney started to pursue a medical defense but withdrew after the couple disagreed with him on strategy. The court then appointed two attorneys because the couple could no longer afford to hire their own, having sold their house to help pay more than $40,000 in legal and expert fees.

Aware that prosecutors had also suspected the baby's mother, the court-appointed attorneys urged Alejandro to save himself by pinning the blame on her. He refused.

Back at home, Lisa fixated on one promising detail in the toxicologist's report: Six days after her son died, when doctors and prosecutors were already convinced it was a homicide, the hospital received the results of a lab test that had been done in Colorado.

It was a PIVKA-II test. The lab said a normal value would be between zero and 3.5. Lucas scored a 22.7.

Lisa did more online research, and she learned about another case in which the test had played a key role: the death of Sara Lynn Glick.

She read about Morton, the doctor who had helped the Amish family, and tried to reach him by phone. No luck. Months later, in early 2005, still doing research, she came across the Glick case again - and noticed something that chilled her.

Lucas and Sara had died at the same hospital.

Lisa decided to contact Morton again, only this time, she wrote him a letter. Within days, there was a message on her answering machine.

It was Morton, speaking in the West Virginia drawl that she would come to know well.

She called back.

The doctor said: "I want everything overnighted."

A legal gamble

At a glance, Holmes Morton and Charles Hehmeyer don't seem to have much in common. An amateur pilot, Hehmeyer wears suits and handles multimillion-dollar medical-malpractice cases from his Rittenhouse Square office.