South Florida Sun Sentinel from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • Page 5

Sun-Sentinel, South Florida Witho a Trace ABDUCTED: Teekah Lewis appears in a family photograph that was taken shortly before she vanished Jan. 23, 1999, in Tacoma, Wash. 4 I Digest Sun-sentinel wire reports WASHINGTON Clinton: U.S. to fight Medicare swindles President Clinton said on Saturday he wants to send a "fraud fighter" to the office of every Medicare contractor in the country in a new campaign to crack down on billions of dollars in false claims. Clinton asked Congress to approve the $43 million cost of the initiative as part of the federal budget for fiscal 2001.

He said it is needed to stop a raid on the Treasury that persists despite what he called aggressive detection, enforcement and prosecution efforts. Clinton took credit for persistent efforts to stem fraud and abuse in the Medicare health care program. "All told, our efforts have prevented the wasteful spending of an estimated $50 billion," he said. NORTHEAST Mother charged with dumping infant ALLENTOWN, Pa. A woman who claimed she found a newborn baby when she took her family's trash to the curb was arrested Saturday on Charges she left the child outside in a garbage bag on a freezing night last week.

Jenny Suarez, 21, turned herself in to police to face charges of reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child, both misdemeanors. She was also charged with filing a false report. Suarez had bid police that she found the hours-old baby when she took her family's trash to the curb on Tuesday night. Suarez's mother then called 9 1 1 not knowing the child was her grandchild. The temperature had dropped to 18 degrees at the time Suarez said she found the Child.

The baby, dubbed "Baby Jane" by nurses, was in stable condition at Sacred Heart Hospital on Saturday. SOUTH Anchor ruptures Gulf oil pipeline NEW ORLEANS A crude jail slick floated on the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday after an underwater pipeline was ruptur-d by an 8-ton anchor dropped Iccidentally from a drilling rig. The slick was floating slowly westward, about 15 miles south of New Orleans and 75 miles south of the closest bind, and did not pose an immediate threat to coastal areas, Coast Guard spokesman Jason Neubauer said. No dead birds or fish had been sighted. MOTHER AND SISTER: A T-shirt showing Teekah Lewis hangs on a bedroom door in Theresa English, and sister, Tameeka Lewis, stand nearby on Jan.

6. AP photoLauren McFalls States tackling the HMO problem Repair measures: are stacking up By CAREY GOLDBERG The New York Times BOSTON When Massachusetts legislators returned to work this month, these jumbo-sized, hard-to-chew items were on their legislative plate: The financial meltdown of the state's biggesf health maintenance organization Harvard Pilgrim Health Care; rising prices for prescription drugs; and the lack of an HMO patients' bill of rights. And more: The confidentiality'of medical records; more prompt payment by insurers; long-term care; nursing salaries, and on and on, for at least 400 bills related to health care. As they contemplated the labor ahead, the Massachusetts legisla-: tors could at least console themselves that they were far from alone. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, health care issues made up a greater proportion of bills in state legls-; latures around the country than any other topic in 1999, about 27,000 bills out of about 1 40,000.

About 1,400 of those health care bills became law last year. AI-; though fewer state legislatures are in session this year 44 as op-' posed to 49 already 16,000 health care proposals, again the largest proportion of 1 04,000 bills on the table, have carried overor been introduced for 2000. A good percentage will pass, said Lee Dixon, director of the health policy tracking services of the National Conference of State Legislatures. "There is every likelihood that the states will continue to enact legislation that addresses the cori-cerns of the citizens of the states around access to care, managed care and cost of health care," Dixon said. "It's a populist issue.

It's noti Republican or Democratic issu It's state legislators and legislate tures trying to address the needs qf their constituents." At a time when Congress i stuck on many critical health care questions, some state legislators say they feel as if they are bearing the brunt of the burden, struggling to fill the most gaping holes in the medical system. They cannot wait for Congress, they say, to tighteij. controls over managed care, to ejf: pand health insurance coverage, tp begin addressing the rise in dej; mand for long-term care, and more. While the states can serve as lar oratories for what later becomes federal policy, some legislators say the load is feeling awfully heavy. "As state lawmakers, we recogS nize that this has fallen to us, butj think you would be hard pressed tQ find many legislative leaders in the country who don't think the time is ripe for a national health policy some sort," said state Rep.

Gerar3 Martineau, the Democratic majorC ty leader of the Rhode IslanS House. "Some sort of solution necessary. It's just too big, anfl we've been doing the best we can. In Rhode Island, legislators hav just finished helping to assure th transition of 125,000 patients to new health care plans after Har vard Pilgrim pulled out in an earlier admission of financial defeat. In the coming weeks, Martineau said! legislators will try to fashion some relief for companies whose healtfi insurance premiums have gone ug from 12 percent to 60 percent asjj result.

They are considering a plajj to help small companies fornj groups to gain lower rates. The focus now, Martineau said is how the state can prevent such crises in health maintenanci groups and "how we can act as a faJ cilitator to improve the affordabilE ty and accessibility of health care t3 our citizenry." JJ A similar focus prevails in Wig consin, where state Sen. RusseJJ Decker, a Democrat, said that three competing proposals to help oldei? people pay for prescription druglS were in the works, along with plan for a patients' bill of rights. In Maryland, the speaker of thS House of Representatives is pro! posing a broad program to expaiwl health insurance coverage for working people and children. her Tacoma, home as her mother, Tameeka kicks off her shoes as soon as her mother's back is turned, the same way Teekah did.

They share the same shy smile. English misses the little things the most fixing Teekah's cereal or watching Winnie-the-Pooh together. Sometimes she sleeps with the pink fleece jacket Teekah wore to the bowling alley that night. Teekah's bed is covered with Pooh bears, including Teekah's first one, its fur rubbed off in places where a little girl held it tight. English has bought all the special-edition Poohs, each new bear marking another holiday without her girl Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas.

When Teekah comes back, English says, she doesn't want her daughter to feel as if she has missed anything. On second thought, English says, she'll want to get rid of the bears when Teekah returns. It makes sense, she says, when you consider what must have happened: Teekah was stolen by a couple who wanted a mixed-race child but couldn't have a baby of their own. English is part Chippewa Indian and Lewis is black. The kidnappers have Teekah locked up in a white house way out in the country, spoiling her rotten, English figures.

When Teekah cries for her mother, they tell her, "Your mommy and daddy don't want you no more." "They've probably showered her with gifts of Pooh," English says, looking at the bears on Teekah's bed. "She probably won't be a Pooh fan no more. We'll probably just give them away." The police have their own theories. They expected to find something, perhaps a body, when the property next to the bowling alley was excavated for development. Nothing turned up.

"If you talked to a hundred police officers, they would all probably say she's dead," Lindberg says. "They would say she's near the bowling alley somewhere we just haven't found her." English will not listen to such talk. "Teekah was my heart," she says. "I wait for the day the police tell me they have my daughter. They have to find her.

I know she'll come home." English woke up on Christmas Eve feeling certain that the phone would ring with good news. She waited at home all day, but she didn't get one call. That night, she drove to her mother's house for a big family dinner, videotaping the visit for Teekah. "This is what Grammy's house looks like," English's voice says from behind the camera. "This tree has ribbons for every day you've been gone," she says, then she starts to cry as the camera sweeps across hundreds of ribbons fluttering in the wind.

"Teekah, Mommy misses you. She loves you. Wherever you're at, I hope the person that has you gives you the best Christmas ever. "There's not a day goes by that I don't think about you. I'll never give up the search for you.

I love you, Teekah." By REBECCA COOK THE ASSOCIATED PRESS TACOMA, Wash. Theresa English looked away for only a minute. It was Jan. 23, 1999, and English was watching her 2-year-old daughter play in the video arcade of a crowded bowling alley. The mother of five walked over to the lane where her friends and family were bowling, then quickly returned to the video games.

Teekah was not there. English scanned the crowds of children and adults that filled Tacoma's New Frontier Lanes that Saturday night. She checked the spaces between the video games, in case Teekah was playing hide-and-seek. She walked into the women's restroom, where a cousin was changing her baby's diaper. "Have you seen Teekah?" English said, checking the stalls.

"No," her cousin replied. English ran out of the restroom and found an off-duty police officer, who started searching with her. Over the loudspeaker, a voice announced that a 2-year-old was missing. People went on bowling, cheering for strikes, groaning for gutter balls. But English knew something was seriously wrong.

Teekah was a mama's girl who cried when others tried to hold her. She wouldn't even let uncles or aunts pick her up. English pushed open a side door near the arcade and stood in the cold night air, the heavy door muffling the clonk and clatter inside the bowling alley. She called her daughter's name again and again, her shouts fading into the woods surrounding the alley. Teekah was scared of the dark.

English felt panic welling up but pushed it back down. "She's going to come back," she thought. That night was the last time English saw her daughter. One year later, investigators say Teekah's disappearance is a rare and baffling case that defies the pattern of most child abductions. For weeks stretching into months, hundreds of police and volunteers searched the woods and neighborhoods near the bowling alley.

TV, newspaper and radio reports carried Teekah's photograph and her description. Twenty-five detectives worked full time for a month on the case. Tips poured in, but nothing led to Teekah. At first, English and her family were prime suspects, if only because detectives knew the statistics: In 97 percent of all child abductions, the child is taken by a relative. English seemed too calm, some investigators thought.

But what looked like coldheartedness was shock, English says now. The mother, 28, can't explain her demeanor in those first days any more than she could explain her reactions in a nightmare. The Tacoma Police Department, with help from the FBI, conducted parallel investigations from the start. One focused on the family, while the other looked at the possibility of abduction by a stranger. Teekah's father, Robert Lewis, is serving his third year of a four-year prison term for theft, and police do not consider him a likely suspect.

No one except Toddler's baffling disappearance breaks the mold of most child kidnappings. Theresa English has been ruled out. But after a year of investigation, Tacoma Police Detective Larry Lindberg says, "There isn't any evidence the family had anything to do with it." Lindberg says police have interviewed almost all 300 people who were at the bowling alley that night, many of them twice. From those interviews, they have two slim leads. Somebody saw a car careen out of the parking lot a bit too fast that night.

It was a maroon Pontiac Grand Am, late 1980s or early '90s model, probably a four-door, with tinted windows and a spoiler. A teenage boy said he saw a man who might have been following a little girl near an exit. The man was white, in his 30s, with a pockmarked face, mustache and shoulder-length brown hair. He was wearing jeans and a blue checked flannel shirt. He had "a big fat nose," the teen said.

Lindberg knows those leads are not much, but they're all he has. He and Detective Becky Zeutschel sometimes read through the Teekah reports six blue three-ring binders, each about four inches thick hoping to find something they missed. Lindberg, a 25-year police veteran, says he tries not to let it get to him. But Zeutschel, who has dealt more closely with the family, has trouble shaking Teekah from her mind. English sometimes calls her in the middle of the night, crying and asking about the case.

If the family is frustrated by the lack of progress, so is Zeutschel. At a prayer vigil for Teekah, she listened as one of English's brothers complained that the case had not been solved. She took him aside and said she was trying her best. "This case almost haunts me," she told him. Teekah's memory haunts the home where she lived with her mother, a one-story house with a mossy roof and concrete block steps, across the highway from the port of Tacoma.

Pictures of her line the walls, and her smiling face stares at visitors until she seems to come alive, running down the hallway to hug her mother's leg. But that's Tameeka, Teekah's younger sister. She is almost 2, the age Teekah was when she disappeared. Tameeka looks so much like her sister that a neighbor recently called police to report that Teekah was not missing after all she was in the yard, playing with her mother. Tameeka wakes her mother in the morning and says, "Mommy, I want cereal," just as Teekah did.

She loves french fries, Teekah's favorite food. MIDWEST Boy, 14, accused in baby's death I ROCKFORD.Ill. Aboy, 4, faces murder and sexual assault charges in adult court for allegedly feeding windshield fluid to his 13-month-old niece after the toddler scratched him. 5 Juvenile Court Judge Steven Jtfash ordered Braxton Bowers adult court on Friday, saying here may be no hope of rehabilitation "if in fact he is the perpetrator of such fundamentally brutal, vicious acts." If convicted, Bowers could be S'ent to a juvenile jail until age 17 and then spend the rest of his fife in adult prison. As a juvenile, jjis most serious punishment would be detention until age 2 1 i CORRECTION jjf Thursday's lottery results were incorrect in some editions jef Saturday's Sun-Sentinel.

The Correct numbers selected on Friday, Jan. 21, were: Cash 3: 5-3-0 5 Play 4: 4-7-3-4 I Fantasy 5: 8-9-17-19-20 Megamoney: 16-27-30-23-5 In Thursday's Fantasy 5 results, which also were omitted, 36,444 winners selected three Correct numbers; the payout Was $5.50. There were 726 winders who selected four correct flumbers; the payout was $42. Four winners selected five correct numbers; the payout was $45,878. 17.

We regret the error..