Staff tried to stop sick baby's parents

An alert went out when Dargaville couple Roby and Deborah Moorhead fled Starship hospital with their sick child, the High Court at Auckland heard yesterday.

Joanna Hill, a staff nurse at the children's hospital, said the "code orange" alert was to inform security guards and the hospital duty manager of the situation after she saw the Moorheads walking swiftly down a corridor with their son, Caleb, ignoring her request to wait and see a paediatrician.

The boy's parents, Roby Jan Moorhead, 45, and Deborah Anne Moorhead, 34, both of Dargaville, are accused of manslaughter by failing to provide the necessaries of life.

The trial is before Justice Rhys Harrison.

The couple, who are vegans, abstaining from meat, fish and dairy products, believed God and herbal remedies would save their child.

The Moorheads are not represented in court by a lawyer. They have declined to cross examine any witnesses.

Six-month-old Caleb Moorhead died of bronchia-pneumonia two weeks after the parents fled the hospital on March 14 last year and went into hiding at Bombay, in South Auckland.

The jury heard that on March 14, paediatrician Dr Andrew Stewart told the Moorheads three times of the need to do a range of diagnostic tests on Caleb, including blood and urine tests, a brain scan and a lumbar puncture. He had profound anaemia and significant shrinkage of the brain.

The parents, who wanted to administer herbal remedies, asked for time to consider the diagnostic tests. They then picked up Caleb and left the hospital.

The charge nurse manager, Julie Thompson, told the court how she followed the Moorheads and caught up with them outside the hospital.

Julie Thompson said Deborah Moorhead stopped to talk to her, giving Caleb to her husband, who kept on walking with the couple's two daughters. She asked Deborah Moorhead what she was doing and why. The mother responded that she was worried about the baby.

"I said 'you do know the baby could die if you take him from the hospital' and she said everything would be all right and she left," Julie Thompson said.

Two weeks later, Caleb's parents woke to heavy breathing from the child, which they described "like an asthma".

Over the next hour they applied herbal remedies, including a cayenne pepper treatment. Caleb died about 2.25am. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR failed to revive him.

Earlier in the day, a paediatrician at the Starship, Dr Patrick Kelly, told the court that Caleb's life could have been saved as late as half an hour before his death if his parents had chosen to call an ambulance so he could be given oxygen and put on a ventilator until he received the vitamin B12.

Dr Kelly said he told Roby Moorhead on March 20 that Caleb had a life-threatening illness that, left untreated, would lead to his death and if he developed another illness death could be sudden.

After that meeting, Dr Kelly said he did some research in the library and soon found articles about children who had been breastfed by vegan mothers and had developed similar symptoms at a similar age.

"The penny dropped and I realised that both his brain damage and anaemia were a consequence of B12 deficiency," Dr Kelly said.

Had Caleb received B12 at birth, his illnesses would not only have been treatable but preventable. When he first was seen by a doctor, an injection of B12, followed by daily supplements, would have left him a normal baby.

Even when Caleb was admitted to Starship on March 13 and given B12 at that point, he would have staged a dramatic, and even possibly, complete recovery, Dr Kelly said.

Dr Kelly said B12 was an essential dietary vitamin that could not be produced by the body. It was made only by bacteria. The usual source was animal products contaminated with bacteria.

He said newborn babies were born with enough stores of B12 in the liver for three-to-six months at which point they started eating meat solids.

B12 was vital for growing the brain of newborn babies.

A blood test during pregnancy showed that Deborah Moorhead had reduced vitamin B12 levels.

Dr Kelly said that in Caleb's case when his supplies of B12 in the liver ran out, all he had was his mother's breast milk which was inadequate for his needs.