James Short wants to be a scientist when he grows up. The 9-year-old East Baltimore boy smiles dreamily when asked about it and says he wants to work with computers and "potions."
His mother says James is an eager student, but he is reading a year behind his third-grade classmates. He has difficulty with spelling, math and handwriting. He wears thick eyeglasses to help him see.
"On spelling, he gets a 56, and he's real excited," says his mother, Jennie Short. "I have to tell him, 'No, baby, you didn't pass this one.' "
James has lead poisoning. There is enough lead in his bloodstream to permanently damage his brain, despite repeated hospitalizations and painful medical treatments to purge his body of the toxic metal.
The lead from dust and flaking house paint that he inhaled or swallowed over the years has settled in his bones. From there, it leaches slowly into his veins, a timed-release toxin.
For Jennie Short, her family's four-year ordeal with lead was "like a nightmare," as they moved from one dilapidated city rowhouse to another, vainly seeking safe shelter. Three of her six children and a niece who lived with them were poisoned badly enough in the process to require hospitalization.
The worst seems over now. The family lives in a garden apartment off Pulaski Highway owned by the city Housing Authority. The apartment is free of lead-based paint.
And Jennie Short's three lead-poisoned children and her niece have won nearly $1 million in an out-of-court settlement with the insurance companies and lawyers for landlords of the four rowhouses where the family lived from 1983 to 1987.
The $967,500 settlement reached last fall is believed to be the largest ever in a lead-poisoning lawsuit in Maryland. But it is just one claim in a mounting pile of litigation; lead's tragic toll on children has spawned a growth industry for lawyers, some of whom advertise for cases in newspapers and on television.
Lawyers on both sides estimate that anywhere from 1,600 to 3,000 lawsuits have been filed in Baltimore alone by tenants and former tenants who claim their children were poisoned by dust or flakes from deteriorating lead-based house paint in their rented homes. One lawyer, Saul Kerpelman, says he has filed about 1,000 suits himself.
Most cases are quietly settled, for amounts ranging from $1,500 to $300,000, lawyers say. But the rising tide of claims, climaxed by the Short family's settlement, has prompted some insurance companies to cancel or not renew lead-poisoning liability coverage on city rental properties. And, without insurance, landlords may be held personally liable.
"There's a high percentage of landlords who are flying naked," says Kerpelman. "It's sort of bringing the problem to a head."
LEGAL PRESSURE
Stewart Levitas, for one, says that worries about the impact of lead-poisoning lawsuits on his business keep him awake at night.
"It can really eat you up, and I like what I do," says Levitas, president of the Property Owners Association of Baltimore, a group of landlords who own about 75,000 rental units. Levitas says he is the target of several suits. And he has been notified that he will lose his lead-poisoning insurance coverage, Levitas says.
No one, it seems, is immune from being sued in a city where 200,000 dwellings -- two-thirds of all the housing units -- were built before 1950, when lead-based paint was widely used.
The housing authority, the city's biggest landlord with more than 19,000 public-housing units, is defending itself against 14 lawsuits. Even City Homes, an arm of James Rouse's Enterprise Foundation that has acquired 170 rundown homes to rehabilitate them, was sued recently by a former tenant.
The legal wrangle has given rise to finger-pointing, with landlords complaining of "greedy, grabby lawsuits" while tenants' lawyers accuse landlords of being too greedy to spend what it takes to remove deteriorating lead paint from their properties before it poisons children.
Despite the size of the settlement in the Short family's case, C. Christopher Brown, their lawyer, argues that "the losers are the kids."
Jennie Short's 11-year-old daughter, Tasha Leak, seems fine now. But James, and Jennie's other son, 6-year-old Marcus Lowery, got unusually large doses of lead, and the damage done to their brains may handicap them the rest of their lives.
HIGH READINGS
James had a lead level of more than 100 micrograms per decileter of blood, four times the government's current poisoning threshold. (A microgram is one-thousandth of a gram.) At high levels, lead can cause convulsions, coma and even death. Marcus' reading was around 50 micrograms.
Each poisoned child was hospitalized for weeks at a time while undergoing chelation therapy, a process in which special drugs are repeatedly injected into the veins. The drugs chemically bind to lead in the bloodstream and carry the metal out of the body in the urine.
The chelation treatments worked, to a point. But so much lead had accumulated in the boys' bones that they still harbor toxic levels in their blood. James's most recent test, taken last fall, registered 35 micrograms, while Marcus still had 26 micrograms of lead, their mother says. Twenty-five micrograms is the poisoning threshold.
James, a "C" student in school, probably has lost 15 IQ points from lead poisoning, says Brown, the lawyer. "He'd be an above-average student, but for lead."
Marcus lost about 10 IQ points, Brown says. "Unfortunately, his IQ was low to begin with, so he got bumped even farther down the line."
James requires special tutoring and instruction in school, and the children's ability to get and keep good jobs as adults may be undermined by their impaired learning ability, Brown says. Economists estimated that, based on the IQ reductions the children experienced, they will lose something like $365,000 in earnings over their lifetime, he says.
Jennie Short's children were lucky, in a way, Brown says, because two of their former landlords had insurance to pay the bulk of the settlement. Children who are poisoned in uninsured homes are likely to collect far less, if anything, if they sue.
REMOVAL COSTS
Many landlords complain that they cannot afford to remove lead paint from their properties, but Brown counters: "The numbers of this case don't show me a landlord who can't afford to make improvements."
At one rowhouse, he says, the landlord was collecting $2,900 a year in rent on a property he had bought for $7,000. "That's not a bad business deal," Brown says.
The hospitalization alone cost $205,000 for the four poisoned children in the Short household.
"It seems to me that you can buy a nice house for that," Brown says.
The state and the Kennedy Institute, an arm of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions that treated the children, are due to get repaid from the settlement, Brown says. And his law firm gets a one-third share, about $300,000.
The remainder of the settlement will be invested in annuities or some other form of trust, with the proceeds going to the children when they reach adulthood.
"I hope the publicity about this case will get landlords to realize that running inner-city housing is a serious enterprise," Brown says. "Neglect can have serious consequences."
TROUBLES BEGIN
For Jennie Short and her children, the consequences began after she moved to Baltimore to get away from an abusive husband in South Carolina. She settled, with just two suitcases and four children, in a rented rowhouse at 1410 Holbrook St.
Short says she didn't suspect anything was wrong with her children until blood tests revealed high levels of lead in James, then 2, and two relatives' children sharing the house. They all had to be hospitalized for a month.
The family moved into a neighbor's basement temporarily while the landlord removed lead-based paint from the windowsills and door frames of the Holbrook Street house. The abatement proved ineffective -- the city has since changed its regulations to demand much more complete de-leading -- and after the Shorts moved back in, Tasha became poisoned.
So Jennie Short moved her family to another rowhouse, at 2103 Barclay St., which she shared with her niece. The lead-based paint there was deteriorating, too, so the family vacated temporarily once again to allow for abatement.
This time, the paint removal seemed successful. But the family was evicted after Jennie Short's niece moved out and Jennie was unable to pay the $290 monthly rent by herself. She recalls she was receiving a total of $455 a month in public assistance at the time.
The family wound up at 1518 Rutland Ave. Short kept taking her children for blood tests, and one day not long after moving in she learned in dramatic fashion from city health officials that James had been poisoned again. This time he had a life-threatening level of lead in his bloodstream -- 110 micrograms per decileter.
"I was sitting on the doorstep just letting him play," she says, "and they came and took him. I wanted to change him and give him a bath, but they took him right away."
Marcus and James both wound up in the hospital this time. In all, James was hospitalized nine months and Marcus seven. The Rutland Avenue house also was inadequately de-leaded under the since-discredited city regulations, and the children's lead levels remained high, so they needed repeated medical attention.
PLACING BLAME
During the darkest times, when her children were going back and forth to the hospital, Jennie sometimes blamed herself, and others, for their plight.
"I thought this child may never be normal, but I had to fight against it," she says. "I had to be strong for them."
Short says the landlords' lawyers tried to portray her as a negligent mother and accused her children of tearing the houses up and generating the lead dust that poisoned them.
She says she tried to keep the house clean, patched holes in the walls and tried to follow dietary guidelines provided by a City Health Department nurse, since eating nutritious meals and avoiding junk food helps counter the effects of lead. But Jennie says she was fighting a losing battle because the house was in such poor shape.
"If I had dusted this table this morning, you'd come in [a few hours later] and put your hand in it, the dust was so bad," she says.
"Not all of my clients are angels," says Brown, her lawyer, who has about 40 lead-paint lawsuits. "Some are on drugs or have so many kids their lives are out of whack." But Jennie Short, he says, is an angel.
The family finally escaped its lead-laced nightmare in 1987, when it moved to Hollander Ridge, an apartment complex off Pulaski Highway run by the City Housing Authority. Jenny had been on the waiting list for public housing since 1982.
She's glad to be in public housing at last. She works part-time as an aide at Tasha's school and hopes one day to be able to teach children with learning disabilities. Tasha and Marcus seem to be doing well in school, and James seems to be making some progress, too.
But she must watch what James eats, outlawing fried foods and chocolate, because the wrong diet can make him more vulnerable to lead's toxic effects.
Though the poisoned children now have a trust fund to help them, Jennie Short worries about their future.
"As they get older, all three kids could be denied a lot of things -- top-priority jobs," she says. "With James, [the lead] could cause retardation, Lord forbid it."
But she says she bears no one, not even the landlords, any bitterness. She hopes others can learn from her family's case about the dangers of lead poisoning.
"I really want to help someone else, try to get them a message," she says, "to test their house before the family moves in [and to] get the lead out before a child gets poisoned."
NEXT: A vicious circle.
Recapping the series
In a six-month study of lead poisoning as an environmental hazard to children, The Evening Sun has found that:
* About 500 cases of severe poisoning show up each year in Maryland, mostly in Baltimore because the city has 200,000 homes built before 1950 when lead-based paint was widely used on many household surfaces.
* These severe cases are just the tip of an invisible epidemic that reaches beyond the city into the suburbs and hits all income groups. Health officials estimate that 166,000 children under age 6 in the Baltimore-Washington area have lesser but still harmful levels of lead in their bloodstreams.
* These lesser levels fall below what is officially considered poisoning. But recent medical studies indicate that permanent neurological and physical damage, such as learning and behavioral problems and stunted growth, still can result.
* Even though lead can subvert their most formative stage of life, poisoned children generally show no clear-cut symptoms, and most cases go undetected because only a fraction of the youngsters at risk are ever checked.
* The most common mechanism for poisoning: Children under 6, who habitually put their fingers in their mouths, ingest the toxic dust from deteriorating lead-based paint in their homes.
* Other possible sources of lead around the home: soil contaminated by paint chips or auto emissions, drinking water that passes through lead pipes or plumbing with lead solder, and some imported pottery that is poorly glazed.
For more information
Call the Maryland Department of the Environment at 631-3859 if you have questions about medical testing, testing of homes for hazardous lead, and what to do if you find it. Your local health department also can help.