happened, i have become hooked on courtv, and i've learned a lot about the way the law works and about the way forensics play into aase where there is no eyewitness especially. a little girl died. and investigators didn't know why or how. was it an accident? was it an unexplained illness? or was she murdered? scientists would go halfway around the world before finding the answer in two unlikely places. a shredded legal document and her mother's signature. >> in the spring of 2000, a 2 1/2-year-old girl was in the intensive care unit of a new

hampshire hospital fighting for her life. >> from the very beginning, no one knew that she had anything more than a bad cold, but then she went downhill so dramatically. >> her name was sunday abek, and her story was unlike any other in the hospital. sunday was from the sudan where a bloody civil war was claiming thousands of lives. she and her family were lucky to be alive. >> she had to flee because of violence in her area. her father was a political prisoner in sudan. and that may have been more dangerous for her family to remain in the sudan because of that. >> translator: people were being killed. it didn't matter what side you were on, we had to leave. >> shortly after sunday was born, the family fled to a refugee camp in egypt. after two years, a missionary group was able to get them to a small apartment in manchester, new hampshire. no one in the family spoke

english. the change from their life in africa was enormous. >> there must have been a culture shock. this is an old mill city in new hampshire, big mill buildings and what not. much colder weather. but this family moved in and started to prepare a better life, a safer life. they thought at least their kids could be raise the without getting shot at. >> the family had been in the u.s. for just a little more than a month. when one day, for no apparent reason, sunday started vomiting. she ran a high fever and she became delirious. >> her mother was sleeping on the hospital floor in sunday's room. she would sit and hold the child in her arms and that was her main concern was that sunday was sick and she had to get her better. >> at first, doctors thought sunday had contracted a bad case of the flu. but none of their treatments worked. and they were unsure what was wrong with her. >> sunday's initial symptoms were high fever and vomiting.

and that could be anything. >> despite a battery of tests, the cause of sunday's illness couldn't be determined. none of her siblings or her mother had gotten sick. three days after she was admitted to the hospital, sunday's temperature soared. and her brain swelled uncontrollably. she went into a coma. and died. >> translator: when you have children, god gives them to you and he can take them. when sunday died, i tried to remember that god gave her to us, and now he wanted her back. >> for sunday's family, the promise of a peaceful life in america had turned into an unspeakable tragedy. >> the mother's lawyer said that she had told him that if she had any idea this could have happened, she never would have moved her family to the united states. but of course she couldn't have known. she knew she was moving them away from a danger. she just had no way of knowing she was moving them into another

danger. >> soon, an investigation was mounted to find out how it happened. and what it uncovered was not an and what it uncovered was not an illness but a crime. enhour eye. it's 1-day acuvue® define™ brand contact lenses. the eye enhancement lenses that comfortably accentuate your eyes' natural beauty. ask your doctor today about 1-day acuvue® define™ brand.

during a spring snowstorm in 2000, 2 1/2-year-old sunday abek was laid to rest thousands of miles from her native sudan. >> i'll never forget the women in the group wearing their african clothes and wool hats and gloves, and they were singing african prayers as the snow came down. they probably never saw snow before, and the whole scene to me was just one of the saddest things. >> after two years on the run, the family thought they had finally found a safe haven in america. but they were wrong. >> they had come here trying to have a better life for their daughter, and they end up burying her in this snowstorm in new hampshire. and that led to an intriguing story. how did this come to pass? >> investigators thought poisoning might be a possibility. >> whenever there's an

unexplained death of a child, i think the police first suspect is always a family member. >> sunday's mother was questioned, but she had no apparent motive. she was asked if one of the siblings could have done it. >> translator: it was ridiculous. in africa, a child cannot poison her sister or her brother or even me. they wouldn't know how. it did not come from the family. >> was it possible one of the neighbors, perhaps resentful over the influx of refugees into the neighborhood, was responsible? >> translator: in our apartment complex was another family from sudan. before my child got sick, so did theirs, but he recovered. he didn't die. >> but a severe flu caused that child's illness. new hampshire officials couldn't determine how sunday died. and this raised alarms. >> one of their initial concerns was to make sure there was not

the importation into the u.s. of some exotic disease that could have been transmitted by sunday or her family into the u.s. >> all members of the family were thoroughly tested. everyone was perfectly healthy. but then results came back from an extensive test on sunday's blood. analysts were shocked by what they found. her blood contained unusually large amounts of lead. 392 micrograms per deciliter, 40 times the lethal level for a child. >> high level for us might be 50 or 60. i think we may have even had a 70 or 80 over the years that i've done inspections. but a 392 was just absolutely off the charts for us. >> lead kills by attaching itself to red blood cells. this takes oxygen out of the blood and starves the brain. sunday's official cause of death was lead poisoning. the first such case in the u.s.

in more than a decade. >> the family seemed to be having trouble grasping what had happened. one of them said to me, you know, we don't very lead in africa. in africa, lead is bullets. you're getting shot at. >> investigators now checked the rest of the family to see if they had also been exposed to lead. the tests showed they were all within normal levels. >> there was something unique to sunday. it wasn't something that they had he commonly all been exposed to that created this horrific problem for all of the family. >> how could a killer dose of lead have gotten into sunday's system while the rest of the family was unaffected? their apartment building was locked down in a search for answers. paint, the most common source of lead poisoning, was tested with a portable x-ray analyzer. >> it uses a radiation source to

basically excite the lead atoms in the paint, and then it actually sends x-rays back into the machine. >> minor amounts of lead were found in the paint, not unusual in an old building and not nearly enough to kill someone. >> now investigators moved onto the water, the air, the cooking utensils, and toys. everything in the apartment was tested. >> we would select an area of the home and mark off a square foot and actually wipe it with a sterile wipe and collect the dust and put it in a sterile container and that's analyzed to see what the dust level in the home. >> the contents of the wipes were dissolved in hydrochloric acid. in a process called atomic absorption, the solution was exposed to temperatures of more than 3,000 degrees fahrenheit. no abnormal levels were found. nothing in the building could produce a dose of lead large enough to kill.

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extensive testing provided no clues as to how little sunday abek was exposed to a lethal dose of lead. >> lead has been known as a

hazard for 2,000 years. lead was one of the first occupational diseases identified by the romans and even the greeks many, many years ago. so it's not a new issue. >> while investigators couldn't rule out an intentional poisoning by someone in the u.s., they had to consider the possibility that sunday was poisoned before she got to america. perhaps in the refugee camp. >> they even brought in the health department in egypt and they sampled the formula that the little children were given because if something was contaminated in the formula, that could affect thousands of kids. >> food, air, water and soil in the camp were tested. everything was negative. it seemed the question of how sunday had been killed might never be answered. >> there was this mystery. what had happened to her and why? >> investigators now turned back to sunday herself.

since lead is a poison, the body goes to great lengths to expel it. deposits build up in the nails and hair. the average person's hair grows about a half inch per month. sunday's hair was an inch long. and provided a wealth of information. >> she had spent a month in the united states and before that she had been in egypt. so the by taking her hair and looking at it specifically for lead content, and dividing it in half so that we had the half inch that grew in the united states and the half inch that grew before that, we were able to make a comparison and time her exposure. >> the hair was bombarded with radioactive neutrons. this caused different elements in the sample to react in unique ways. the tip of sunday's hair had trace amounts of lead, but the base, the part closest to the scalp, showed massive amounts. >> what that tells me is in the united states, she got exposed

to a pretty significant amount of lead and that her level before that wasn't abnormal. so her exposure was in this country. it wasn't back in egypt. >> the investigators must have overlooked something, but they didn't know what. >> they went full circle. they went back to manchester. they started saying what did we miss? >> they questioned sunday's mother again and were told something they had not heard before. sunday spent a lot of time on the front porch of their apartment building. >> translator: i knew always that the cause of sunday's sickness had something to do with the apartment. >> they were able to ascertain that the child did in fact spend time playing on the porch and the mother had seen the child pick up -- pick at the paint on the porch. >> the porch of the apartment was in bad shape. the paint was old and peeling. suddenly, investigators thought

they'd solved the mystery. it looked to be a phenomenon called pica. the word comes from the latin name for magpie, a bird that eats almost anything. >> pica is a condition particularly of children but not always of children. it's sort of a craving for food items to eat, lead paint often tastes sweet. so here's a little malnourished girl who has never had enough food. and it became pretty clear she was probably picking up chips of paint and then sucking on them or chewing on them. >> samples of paint from the porch showed levels of lead 37 times the legal limit. to see if it was this paint that killed sunday, investigators brought in the centers for disease control. the samples were dissolved in nitric acid and then heated so the isotopes or chemical signature of the lead would be

exposed. >> we can run the sample of analysis for the child's blood and compare that to the different potential sources that she was exposed to. >> the isotopes from the paint on the porch and from sunday's blood were identical. this test left no doubt sunday abek got a lethal dose of lead by eating the paint on the front porch of her apartment building. but the case was far from over. investigators soon found evidence that someone knew sunday was in danger all along. and mounted an elaborate cover-up to keep that knowledge from her family and police. i've had moderate to severe plaque psoriasis most my life. but that hasn't stopped me from modeling. my doctor told me about stelara®. it helps keep my skin clearer. with only 4 doses a year after 2 starter doses... ... stelara® helps me be in season.

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a year-long forensic investigation proved without a doubt what killed little sunday abek. >> we concluded that lead paint and dust in the environment of her apartment in manchester was the principal source of her lead poisoning. >> property records showed the rental agent for the apartment building, james aneckstein, had been informed that his building did not meet current standards for lead safety. by law, he had to let his tenants know this.

>> landlords and property managers who lease buildings constructed prior to 1977, they are required to provide general lead paint warning notices. >> to prove that they had been informed, tenants must sign these disclosure documents. the landlord provided photocopies of these documents and signed an affidavit saying they were legitimate. investigators weren't so sure. >> the tenants advised us that they had not signed those documents. we're actually looking at them to see if they were forged. >> document experts compared signatures from the documents to known signatures of the tenants. the signatures were exact matches. >> he was too good at it actually because the signatures were too much alike. if he had varied them in some way, it would have been a much

more difficult case to resolve. >> the signatures weren't forgeries. they were duplicates of signatures from other documents the tenants had signed. >> the signatures are what we determined to be a layover. they were an act replica of an authentic signature which indicates to us that it was placed there by some other means and was fraudulent. >> one of these signatures stood out. it was from sunday's mother -- mary alorout. in the document provided by the landlord, her name was spelled out. but at the time, mary could barely write english. >> she was still signing her name with an "x" though she was undergoing training by a church-sponsored teacher to learn how to read and write and speak the english language. it was ready apparent to non-handwriting forensic examiners that this was indeed not her signature. >> investigators raided the landlord's office. in the bottom of a trash can,

they found more than 60 torn scraps of paper. >> the secret service reconstructed that document for us finding all but 1 of the 60 something pieces. >> when the pieces were reassembled, investigators found the original forgery of mary alorout's signature, identical to the one on the lead disclosure notice. >> he forged the signature of sunday abek's mother on the lead paint disclosure form. he copied it and produced copies to the environmental protection agency and the grand jury. >> the landlord's fingerprints were on the document. mary alorout's were not. >> it's very unlikely that she had handled or had anything to do with that particular document. >> investigators say that when aneckstein found out about sunday's deaths he knew he was potentially liable. so he took his tenants' signatures, copied them from

other documents, and then placed them back on to the lead disclosure agreements. his biggest mistake was forging the signature of sunday's mother. apparently he was unaware how she signed her name. so it was clear this was not her signature. when faced with the evidence, james aneckstein pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and failing to notify his tenants that they were living in unsafe conditions. >> what motivated him, what motivates all of our criminals in this arena? it's all about money. want to save it and at what the cost. i think the cost in this one was real high. not to him, to her. >> repainting the porch would have cost just a few hundred dollars and would have saved sunday's life. her family won a $700,000 civil award against aneckstein and his real estate company. he was sentenced to 15 months in

prison and fined $40,000. his was the first ever conviction in the u.s. for failure to notify about the presence of lead. >> he dug himself a real deep hole and got hit with a big penalty. and i think the epa hoped that sent an alarm across the country, so other landlords don't take part in similar activities. >> sunday's family has relocated to tennessee. they're still adjusting to life in america and the aftermath of sunday's death. meanwhile, sunday lies in an unmarked grave in a new hampshire cemetery, hundreds of miles from her family, thousands of miles from home. her death could easily have been avoided, but thanks to the forensic analysis, it's far less likely another family will suffer the same tragedy. >> her death couldn't have been solved without forensics.

the work in the lab is what solved this case, and it happened at the federal, state and local level. it took a lot of technicians to study this material and figure out exactly what happened. and they did, which is and they did. frds . some families are reunited with loved ones, we hear the stories of survival during the attack in kenya. the situation calls for a cease-fire. you are looking at live pictures from st. peter's square where