A couple of months after the California Transplant Donor Network sent the Aspelins their initial thank-you letter, the agency forwarded the family a letter written on February 1, 2011, from the mother of the girl in Tacoma, Washington, who received Johan’s heart. The mother expressed her family’s tremendous gratitude, and Jennie wrote back the following month, telling her that she had been keeping “the letter with me at all times so I can read it whenever I am sad.” Jennie also detailed the child abuse charges pending against Kristian, figuring that the recipient’s family might Google them and find out on their own. Shaken baby syndrome “is a very polarizing topic and if you/your family have strong opinions about it, it’s best you know about our situation now,” Jennie wrote. “I would not be able to handle it if you were to find out about us later and abruptly cut ties.…”

The mother took a long time to write back — nine months. By this point Jennie had a much more detailed and infuriating story to tell about her family. Johan’s complete medical files revealed two major, plot-scrambling incidents.

First, minutes after Johan was admitted to San Francisco General, doctors botched the intubation, causing a complete collapse of one lung and severely compromising the other.

Second, the hospital botched his sedation, twice overdosing Johan with the anesthetic drugs—he received as much as eight times the appropriate dosage of Versed both times he was injected, and he was administered as much as 2.3 times the correct amount of rocuronium each time. This left him essentially paralyzed and unable to communicate distress as air was pumped into his compromised lungs. On the second CT scan, taken at 3 a.m., about seven hours after the first, Johan’s brain looked different. Now instead of moderate bleeding and swelling at the top left of his head, he now had a diffuse brain injury, suggesting insufficient oxygen. He also had a blood clot in his superior sagittal sinus.

Doctors at San Francisco General are known for their speed and skill in treating trauma victims, but relatively few of those patients are babies. So perhaps one reason why, the next morning, Dr. Stewart believed that abusive shaking had caused Johan’s symptoms is that no one seems to have told him that the hospital had massively fucked up. A chest X-ray taken on November 8 at 8:37 p.m. showed Johan’s collapsed lungs, but it’s unclear when this information was relayed to the ICU. Nowhere in the police investigation transcripts does it suggest that doctors considered Johan had a brain injury and retinal hemorrhaging due to low blood-oxygen levels and high carbon dioxide pressure, problems that may result from faulty intubation.

Kristian spent many nights awake, fantasizing about his upcoming trial, as he says, “playing out scenarios in court to call out the fraud.” Maybe he’d show photographs of various pairs of eyes with retinal hemorrhages and ask doctors to identify which hemorrhages resulted from altitude and which from shaken baby — and, of course, they’d fail. Or he’d pose a hypothetical question: Tell me what would happen if you removed 75 percent of the lung capacity on a baby who has overdosed and also had a blood clot. How would that baby fare?

Kristian found the juvenile case against him “almost more insulting and harder to deal with, because to be accused of shaken baby — anyone can lose their temper at any point in time.” Kristian not only resented civil servants watching him play with Lukas, he found Social Services’ assessment techniques perverse. For instance, the agency wanted to do an anger management study on Kristian but, as he asked me, who in his position would not be terrifically pissed off? He also resented being given a Rorschach test. “I was looking at pictures, abstract art, and telling them what I was seeing? Do I see a butterfly here? Does that mean I’m aggressive and abusive? It’s insane.” Kristian believed the agency possessed an essentially female worldview, whereas he had an essentially male one. They privileged relationships and feelings; he put stock in science. What’s more, Social Services created a logic that put Kristian in a double bind. For a hearing at the Superior Court of California, on February 16, 2011, the department argued that Kristian’s insistence that he was innocent was meaningless. The charges he faced carried a potential life sentence so “if he did inflict Johan’s injuries, he could never admit it — at least not now.”

Worse, the agency brought up what they considered a “concerning” event in Kristian’s history: He had been arrested for sexual assault in 1998.

According to police documents, on the night in question, in Tucson, Arizona, Kristian shared a cab from a party to his apartment building with a University of Arizona student. She didn’t live in that building but she intended to visit a friend. Instead, by choice, she entered Kristian’s apartment. There she fell asleep and, she told the police, woke up to Kristian having sex with her. Kristian, when questioned, said the sex was consensual; she was awake, she helped take off her own clothes. Both agree that, after sex, the young woman freaked out, ran away, hopped a fence, and asked a stranger for a ride to the police station. The case was dismissed, but it lingered prejudicially in Kristian’s files.