Clinic closed after King’s death

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican clinic where Coretta Scott King died has been closed, U.S. Embassy officials said yesterday.

Mexican officials weren’t immediately available to explain why the clinic was shuttered, but Judith Bryan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, said the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana was helping patients find new facilities.

The consulate’s spokeswoman, Liza Davis, said 20 American patients were at the clinic when it was closed Thursday. Mexican authorities gave the Americans three days to leave the country.

“None of them were in serious enough condition that we had to get them back in an ambulance,” Miss Davis said. “Lots of them had family with them or means to get back on their own. Those that don’t, we’ll be working with them, and the hospital will be helping them as well.”

Mrs. King traveled last week to the beachside Santa Monica Health Institute in the Mexican resort of Rosarito, 15 miles south of San Diego. She was seeking treatment for advanced-stage ovarian cancer and a stroke she suffered several months ago.

Mrs. King’s children have said she died there Monday night, although a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana has said she died early Tuesday.

The clinic specializes in alternative treatments for patients with incurable illnesses.

Its founder and director, Kurt W. Donsbach, has a criminal past and a reputation for offering dubious treatments to desperately ill patients, according to court records and a watchdog group.

However, the clinic doctors assigned to Mrs. King’s case said she arrived in poor health and they could not even begin to treat her before she died.

“She came here with half her body paralyzed,” Dr. Rafael Cedeno, who was overseeing her case, told reporters after Mrs. King’s death. “She was in really bad condition.”

Mrs. King’s death raised questions about the safety of alternative medical clinics across Mexico, many of which aren’t closely regulated.

It was not clear whether Mr. Donsbach’s past had anything to do with the closing of the Santa Monica clinic.

In 1997, Mr. Donsbach was sentenced in federal court in San Diego to a year in prison for smuggling more than $250,000 worth of unapproved drugs into the United States from Mexico, according to court records. Mr. Donsbach was sentenced on three felony counts, including introducing unapproved drugs into interstate commerce, smuggling merchandise contrary to law and income tax evasion.

In 1988, the U.S. Postal Service ordered Mr. Donsbach and his nephew to stop claiming that a solution of hydrogen peroxide that they sold could prevent cancer and ease arthritis pain.

A woman who answered the phone at the clinic’s corporate offices in San Diego said she had no information on the closure of the Rosarito clinic. Identifying herself only by her first name, Maria, she said she did not know where Mr. Donsbach could be reached.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the clinic’s closure in yesterday’s editions.