Lawsuit: Twin Cities pediatrician altered records in shaken baby murder case as part of conspiracy

A federal racketeering lawsuit alleges that the leading child abuse pediatrician in Minnesota manipulated medical records that directly led to murder charges against a day care provider in the death of a toddler in Minneapolis more than seven years ago.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court by attorney Jay Reinan on behalf of William Reynolds, whose wife, Sylwia Pawlak-Reynolds, was charged with two counts of second-degree murder in Hennepin County in 2018 in the death of 11-month-old Gabriel Cooper. Pawlak-Reynolds was in Poland when she was charged and has been living there ever since.

Dr. Nancy Harper, the Child Abuse Pediatrics Fellowship program director at the University of Minnesota, was the investigative source for the murder charge and is the lead defendant in the lawsuit.

Reinan said the 113-page complaint shows how Harper deploys a national playbook for aggressive prosecution of child abuse cases and shaken baby syndrome within the Twin Cities medical community.

“When she does that, she takes the baby away from the other clinicians and hospitalists that would normally care for this baby and makes this her own domain or the domain of the child protection team,” Reinan said. “The concealed, secret policies and procedures that she has put into place at these hospitals prevent other doctors from documenting conflicting opinions that might weaken her child abuse diagnosis.”

More importantly, Reinan said, Harper’s pursuit can unnecessarily separate children from their parents using the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and child protection services. The lawsuit claims Harper has essentially been given final “prosecutorial discretion in Hennepin County child abuse cases.”

Dr. Bazak Sharon, who specializes in pediatric infectious disease and was head of the U’s COVID-19 pediatric clinic, claims in the lawsuit that Harper directed hospital policy. Sharon says he was forced to resign in 2023 after nearly 17 years because he voiced disagreement with how the child abuse team was handling head trauma cases.

In the suit, Sharon details the internal policies for hospitals with U physicians. He claims those policies allowed Harper to disregard “important medical opinions and findings” of other clinicians if they made it more difficult to prosecute child abuse cases. He also provides an example of a child he was treating who was investigated for abuse over Sharon’s objections. The child and his brother were separated from their parents and placed in foster care for months. The abuse case was ultimately dropped.

Also named as defendants are Hennepin County, Hennepin Healthcare, Hennepin County Medical Center, the Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota, the University of Minnesota Foundation, University of Minnesota Physicians, Fairview Health, the Otto Bremer Trust, three additional Hennepin County doctors and an assistant Hennepin County attorney.

Hennepin County, Hennepin Healthcare and the University of Minnesota said they do not comment on pending litigation. Requests for comment from the Otto Bremer Trust were not returned.

Harper started working child abuse cases in Hennepin County in 2014. The lawsuit shows that from 2008-2015, Hennepin County averaged 1,739 reports of alleged physical abuse against children per year. In 2016, as millions of dollars for child abuse prosecution poured in from the Legislature, that number jumped to 5,709. In 2017, the year Cooper died, it was 4,737.

The lawsuit argues that Harper’s influence is built on science around shaken baby syndrome that has been repudiated and calls the motivation for fabricating medical evidence “complicated” since these are the same people tasked with protecting children and preserving families in Hennepin County.

William Reynolds is seeking damages in excess of $10 million through the suit, which claims his family has lost more than $1 million fighting these allegations over eight years across two continents.

He also argues the current “intertwined organizational structure” in Hennepin County that allows doctors to serve as “part of a criminal prosecution team ... is unlawful and unconstitutional.”

The lawsuit and court records illustrates what happened on July 12, 2017, after Pawlak-Reynolds called 911 screaming in the middle of the morning.

Police arrived to find her in the backyard providing CPR to Cooper, who was in cardiac arrest. He died that afternoon at HCMC.

Several other children were in Pawlak-Reynolds’ care, including Cooper’s sister. She had no other day care violations against her. Pawlak-Reynolds told police she placed the boy in a high chair with pieces of a Rice Krispies bar and a cup of milk before going outside to check on the other children. When she returned, she said, Cooper was limp. Pawlak-Reynolds said he was fussy that morning but hadn’t fallen or shown signs of injury.

Cooper’s mother told paramedics the child had fallen two days earlier, “striking the back of his head,” and had another fall a week before that. Firefighters were seen on Minneapolis Police Department body camera footage observing a large bump and bruises on the back of Cooper’s head. Those observations were included in medical intake forms for Cooper at HCMC by Dr. Ornina Bachour.

Additional tests and treatment by hospital staff found scalp swelling, blood clots in the brain and high levels of pressure inside the skull. Blood tests also showed the boy had a genetic blood clotting disorder.

Later that day, Dr. Sarah Lucken, a staff pediatrician at HCMC and member of the Child Maltreatment Consult Team, examined Cooper. She concluded the boy’s injuries were “caused by an impact that resulted in a skull fracture” and blood pooling near the back of the skull.

The original report from Lucken was sent to Harper the next morning. Lucken also told an investigator with MPD that she had submitted her report. That initial report from Lucken was then “destroyed, modified and/or erased” from hospital records, the suit contends.

At the time, Harper was working at CornerHouse, a child abuse investigative center in Hennepin County. She had full access to Cooper’s medical reports, which noted that Cooper had an “extraordinarily large head circumference” and that Harper knew injuries to children with large heads mimicked injuries from shaken baby syndrome.

The lawsuit claims that after receiving the initial report, Harper manipulated the document by removing and rewriting Lucken’s report, without attribution, and digitally altering timestamps to hide the edits.

“Lucken’s final report, as falsified, modified and edited by Harper” did not mention the reported falls, scalp swelling, skull fracture, head circumference or the genetic blood clotting disorder. The lawsuit claims Harper knew these facts would have absolved Pawlak-Reynolds from criminal liability.

The documentation of Cooper’s fall and the hospital paperwork was largely found through discovery by Reynolds and his attorneys during civil court proceedings.

Seven months after Cooper died, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office charged Pawlak-Reynolds with two counts of second-degree murder.

The charging documents make no mention of Cooper having fallen or struck his head. The charges say Cooper’s parents confirmed he had “not suffered any significant accidental trauma” before the death and they felt Pawlak-Reynolds was overwhelmed on the day their son died.

The charges say Harper determined Cooper’s injuries occurred “as a result of acceleration-deceleration injury with a rotational component, consistent with shaking, with or without impact.” The Hennepin County Medical Examiner did not rule the cause of death as a homicide and said Cooper sustained injuries “under unclear circumstances.”

The criminal case against Pawlak-Reynolds remains open, and there is an active warrant for her arrest in Hennepin County.

But the federal lawsuit claims that on Nov. 14, 2023, the Attorney’s Office issued a letter agreeing to dismiss the murder charges against Pawlak-Reynolds over “lack of evidence” that she shook Cooper. Several weeks later, that offer was rescinded. The lawsuit says the only reason for the retraction was “pressure from Harper.”

Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Britta Nicholson, who brought civil child abuse proceedings against Pawlak-Reynolds, is named as a defendant in the suit.

Pawlak-Reynolds has been living in Poland for the last seven years, away from her two teenage children and Reynolds, who remain in Minneapolis. Child protective services, removed her from her home during the investigation into Cooper’s death at her day care. She was in Poland, pregnant and visiting family, when the criminal charges were filed against her.

In 2019, she told the Minnesota Star Tribune in a Skype interview that she did not want to return to the United States and risk being arrested and separated from her child. “I would have to be a coldhearted mother to abandon a newborn like a piece of luggage,” she said. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t abandon him.”

Extradition proceedings against Pawlak-Reynolds were brought by the Department of Justice in 2019 on behalf of the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. Extradition was denied by the Polish Court in 2023, which ruled that Cooper likely died of accidental and natural causes and that prosecutors omitted evidence in the case.

Cooper’s family brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Pawlak-Reynolds in Hennepin County District Court in 2020 but later dismissed it with prejudice.

The federal lawsuit paints the pursuit of shaken baby syndrome cases as part of a concerted effort by three pediatricians — Harper, Dr. Debra Esernio-Jenssen and Dr. Barbara Knox — who are members of the Ray E. Helfer Society, a nonprofit based in Illinois where Harper is president.

The lawsuit gives several examples of how their prosecution of abuse cases has come under legal scrutiny across the country.

The suit also details how the pursuit of child abuse cases came to be incentivized in Hennepin County.

In 2015, the Legislature introduced a $23.35 million Child Protection Grant that’s distributed each year by the Minnesota Department of Human Services. The money is allocated to counties based on child population, the number of “screened-in” child maltreatment reports and the number of open child protection cases.

Harper’s arrival dovetailed with that influx of money. The lawsuit claims that Harper, who was medical director at the Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children, knew Bremer was providing financial bonuses for the number of children identified as victims of physical abuse.

That financial incentive was in place when Pawlak-Reynolds was charged with murder.

“Sylwia spends her days in abject depression,” the lawsuit reads, noting that in her small town in Poland, she is known as a baby killer. Still, it reads, the family is holding out hope they can be “back together in their home in south Minneapolis.”