Missing chances to find a deadly birth defect’s cause

Sally Garcia still doesn’t know what went wrong with her baby.

When the tiny girl was born on May 25, 2012, she weighed 3 pounds, 6 ounces, measured 19 inches long — and was missing most of her brain and skull.

“I hoped that when she was born she would be perfect and nothing would be wrong,” recalled Garcia, 26, of Prosser, about an hour outside of Yakima. “They pulled her out and my mom started to cry. That’s how I knew she wasn’t OK.”

Dark-haired and dark-eyed, Maria Rosario Perez lived 55 minutes that Friday afternoon before she died of complications of anencephaly, a rare and fatal birth defect. A nurse had just enough time to make casts of the baby’s hands and feet so the family would have something to keep.

Read more from the Seattle Times.